nomadWhat Sustains Us

2011

The Comparative Literature Program’s

Journal of Undergraduate Writing
University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institu-
tion committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with
Disabilities Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats
upon request. Accommodations for people with disabilities will be provided if
requested in advance by calling (541) 346-0934.
 EDITORIAL BOARD
EDITOR
Amanda Cornwall

EDITORIAL BOARD
Dr. Lisa Freinkel
Anna Kovalchuk
Jenny Odintz

MENTORS TO THE UNDERGRADUATE WRITERS

Jacob Barto
Sunayani Bhattacharya
Jeong Chang
Antontio Couso-Lianez
Rachel Eccleston
Valerie Egan
Andrea Gilroy
Susi Gomez
Anna Kovlachuk
Amy Leggette
Chet Lisiecki
Laura Mangano
Emily McGinn
Jenny Odintz
Whitney Phillips
Max Rayneard
Sophie Sapp
Martha Searcey
Dr. Laura Selph
Dr. Michael Stern
Emily Taylor
Mona Tougas

SPECIAL THANKS
to Sharon Kaplan and
The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
for their generous sponsorship
of the Nomad Undergraduate Conference
COVER PHOTOGRAPHY
Braeden Cox
 CONTENTS
vii Editor’s Comments

RAQUEL LEVINE 9 Sustaining/Consuming

the Ego: Francisco Goya’s
and Peter Paul Rubens’
Saturn Devouring his Son

LUCAS ANDINO 28 To Shit as Ginsberg

NICK SNYDER 48 Exsanguinating

Friendship: Alienation
and Love in Let the Right
One In

PATTY NASH 67 Pornography in the

Kitchen: Ree
Drummond’s Pioneer
Woman, Food Porn, and
the Rules of Domesticity

JACOB PLAGMANN 80 Dynamic Self-Becoming

and the Perception of
Christian Sin in
Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov and
the Works of Søren
Kierkegaard

OLIVIA AWBREY 101 Sembene Ousmane’s

“Tribal Scars”:
Storytelling as
Sustenance in Post-
Colonial Senegal
 CONTENTS

KAYLA MEEHAN 118 “Begun by Living Actors,

is Ended by Automa-
tons”: A Discourse of
[Post]humanism and
Discontinuity in The
Possibility of an Island

LAUREN GREENHALL 136 The Red Tent and the

Implications of
Empowerment Within
the Framework of
Niddah

ANNA HARDIN 153 From Typeset to

Hypertext: Stranger in a
Strange Land and the
Future of the Book

JOSHUA ZIRL 171 Flickering Reality:

Illuminating Delusional
Self-Sustainment Using
Nabokov’s Pale Fire

VANIA LOREDO 190 Without a Hand to Hold:

The Exploration of
Brazilian Children’s
Family Reality in Child of
the Dark and Cidade de
Deus

©2011 University of Oregon

Comparative Literature Program
All Rights Reserved
 EDITOR’S COMMENTS

A s I think about this year’s NOMAD theme, “What Sustains

Us,” I’m amazed at the depth and variety of interpretations
of the theme that this year’s mentees brought to the table. From
Saturn Devouring his Son to Brazilian favelas, from scatalogical
poetry to food pornography, our mentees have examined the
question of sustenance in innovative and creative ways, pressing
upon the theme until it yielded up these eleven outstanding
essays.
When I think about what this theme means to me, I can’t help
but think about all of the people who work together to sustain the
NOMAD project. I think of the graduate and faculty mentors who
work to help sustain the efforts of the undergraduate mentees,
who in turn sustain each other through their mutual support,
collegiality, and camaraderie. The mentorship coordinators, Anna
Kovalchuk and Jenny Odintz, who I can’t thank enough for their
tireless efforts, provided sustenance for the project through their
meticulous organization and careful communication. Emily
Editor’s Comments

McGinn and Jenny Odintz labored to sustain the integrity of the

writing through their careful copy editing work, and I am deeply
grateful for their eagle-eyed scrutiny. Sharon Kaplan, Museum
Educator at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, made our
NOMAD conference possible through the generous sponsorship
that she facilitated. Dr. Max Rayneard, editor emeritus, provided
no end of assistance to me as I put the journal together. Dr. Lisa
Freinkel’s leadership, vision, and guidance were invaluable, and 7

of course the whole project would be unsustainable without the

incomparable dedication of Cynthia Stockwell.
AMANDA CORNWALL
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 RAQUEL LEVINE
Raquel Levine is a comparative litera-
ture major with a minor in Spanish.
This essay is dedicated to her Zaidy.
Nomad Prize for Excellence in
Undergraduate Scholarship: Winner

Mentor: Max Rayneard

SUSTAINING/CONSUMING THE EGO:

FRANCISCO GOYA’S AND PETER PAUL RUBENS’
SATURN DEVOURING HIS SON

F rancisco Goya’s 19th century painting, Saturn Devouring his Son,

presents us with an emaciated and startled Saturn tearing away at
a partially devoured corpse. The sickly looking Saturn of Goya’s painting
is one of many renderings of the ancient Greek and Roman myth in
which the angry god devours his children for fear of being overthrown
by them. While Goya’s is perhaps the most popular depiction of the
 myth, the particular image was likely inspired by Peter Paul
Rubens’ majestic representation, completed more than a century
before Goya was born (Hughes 383). In Rubens’ painting of the
10
same title, we see Saturn as an old man ripping at the soft chest of
an infant. Formally, the two paintings share few immediately
obvious aesthetic qualities and do not evoke the same “mood” or
reaction. In fact, the foremost visible commonality between the
two great works is their thematic foundation—Saturn devouring
his son.
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The god Saturn has held various cachets in western culture.

His significance has been subject to flux depending on the social
context from which it is perceived. My essay examines this
transition and how it manifests itself in the ancient festival of
Saturnalia and through various iterations of the Roman Catholic
Carnival in seventeenth century Italy and nineteenth century
Spain. Between the time of Rubens’ and Goya’s rendering of
Saturn, an enormous ideological shift took place that inverted
the figure’s cultural significance from sublimity to abjection, terms
which I will define using Julia Kristeva’s work The Powers of
Horror: Essays on Abjection. I want to consider these pieces not
merely as political protest or emotional expression, as has been
done in the past,1 but as products of the philosophical, theological,
and intellectual environment in which they were created.
The myth of Saturn is that the Roman god (or his Greek
counterpart, Kronos) is destined to be overthrown by one of his
children. To avoid this eventuality he eats each child as he or she
is born. However, their mother, Ops, manages to save their son,

1
See Hughes 383-384; Muller 170-177.
 Saturn Devouring his Son

Peter Paul Rubens, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1636

Zeus, who eventually kills Saturn as was originally predicted

(Warner 53).
At its most fundamental level this tale contradicts one’s
assumptions about linear generational progression and the familial
roles that sustain them: a father should not eat his children. Rather, 11
one expects that he would nurture and sustain his offspring.
However, the myth of Saturn dismantles the security that is
12
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Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-1823

invested into the idea of a father and turns it into something

threatening.
We can use Kristeva’s work to understand this
phenomenon as a collapse of symbolic stability. In Kristevan
semianalysis, the “symbolic realm” is a patriarchal, structured
system of signs, language and law that is in perpetual conflict
with the “semiotic realm,” which exists as a matriarchal, pre-
symbolic state of chaos (12). The ego or the “I” is situated within
the symbolic realm. Its existence is made possible by the subject’s
entry into language (the symbolic realm), which is facilitated by
the infant’s separation from the undifferentiated whole within
which it is a function rather than an individual (13).
This separation is initiated by the “mirror phase,” or the
moment when an infant sees his reflection in the mirror and
recognizes himself as a separate entity from his mother (Kristeva
14). At this point the infant discovers the contours of his body
and realizes there is space between him and his mother (and even
that he is separate from the space that surrounds him), thus
warranting the implementation of language to describe and secure
these newly found borders. Kristeva draws on Freudian stages of
development for her own analysis of the experience of the abject
(as well as of the sublime). The mirror phase is the catalyst for
our relocation from the semiotic realm to the symbolic realm and
Saturn Devouring his Son

requires that we acquire language sustain that independence.

Kristeva says, “the abject confronts us...within our personal
archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of
maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the
autonomy of language” (13). Thus the abject is the potential of
the failure of language as a safeguard from the disorder of the
semiotic realm; a failure of symbolic agency. 13
When Saturn consumes his children it initiates a reversal
of their separation, a reinforcement of the subject into the parental
organism. The semiotic (the illogic of cannibalism and infanticide)
 is consumed by the symbolic (father), which in turn means that
the symbolic order of the linear bloodline is collapsed. In this
way the “I” or the ego becomes lost in the collapse of structure
14
that the myth represents. Kristeva captures that loss of the self,
asking, “how can I be without be without border?” (4). After the
ego’s separation from the semiotic realm, it becomes dependent
on symbolic order to sustain and reinforce that “autonomy;”
language and law are used to quarantine the disorder of the
semiotic realm. Kristeva theorizes that the sublime and the abject
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occur within the immanent space between the symbolic and

semiotic realms.
The experience of the abject is an innate, “corporeal”
reaction that alerts us of the potential of a symbolic collapse such
as we see in the myth of Saturn. It keeps us from crossing the
bounds of the semiotic where “I” cannot exist (11). Sustained by
contradiction, the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order.
What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between,
the ambiguous. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good
conscious” (4). The abject is a vacuum of meaning that Kristeva
refers to as “a weight of meaninglessness,” which both warns and
threatens the subject with the prospect of non-being and sustains
the symbolic (2). The collapse of generational linearity in the myth
of Saturn certainly confronts the us with the potential of non-
being, and reminds us of the instability of our symbolic security.
However, this compulsion to sustain symbolic autonomy
has not always been emphasized. In fact, in his essay “Cannibalism
and Carnivalesque: Incorporation as Utopia in the Early image of
America,” Mario Klarer notes that this collapse of boundaries
has been seen in the past more as a “cosmic wholeness” of the
individual with the universe, than a threat to one’s sense of self.
It is on account of thinking that the abject becomes the sublime.
The sublime, similar to the abject, exists outside our symbolic
bounds; however instead of existing as a vacuum it is “something
added” (Kristeva 12). It is a sensation that is just out of reach, one
that “dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory” (12).
Kristeva writes that “the same subject and speech bring [abjection
and sublimity] into being. For the sublime has no object either”
(11-12). In this way the sublime is an inversion of the abject and
vice versa. For each, the simultaneity and inherent contradictions
that make up their being (or lack thereof) are what make them so
devastating and enthralling.
Saturn’s roles as a god are similarly contradictory yet
interconnected. He is the god of time (Kronos), however, it is
from this broad mantle that his incongruences are born. The
concept of time can be understood linearly or cyclically: cyclic
time suggests a perpetual renewal whereas linear time denotes a
Saturn Devouring his Son

beginning and an end. Each begets ideas of death and transition.

Because of this, Saturn was idolized as the god of the dead and in
keeping with that association, many people offered the god human
sacrifices, which sustains his connection with cannibalism (Pucci
38).
At odds with this foreboding conceptual position, Saturn
was concurrently viewed as the god of celebration and harvest 15
(Pucci 41, 43). Thus, the naturally oppositional qualities of life,
death, sacrifice and bounty lend themselves simultaneously to
the linear and cyclic properties of time. They are the foundation
 of Saturn’s place in cultural and philosophical history as well as
the core of the ancient Roman festival, Saturnalia, which further
highlights the collapse of meaning that is inherent to the god’s
16
image. (Pucci 43).
The Saturnalia, a celebration of Saturn, dates back to the
year 217 B.C.E. and despite its eventual abandonment made
notable cultural impacts across Europe, including its ritual
connections with the Roman Catholic festival, Carnival (Pucci
39). The Saturnalia was a banquet held at the end of the year
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which represented an important transition time for a culture that

was structured around agriculture. This transition period
manifested itself in the celebration on several different layers: it
represented the temporal transition and hope for a bountiful
spring, a transition between life and death, as well as a temporary
cultural transition in which hierarchal roles and social
expectations were reversed or abandoned (Pucci 43-45). On this
day servants or slaves were the commanders of their owners, and
men and women would overindulge in grandiose meals and have
public orgies that would otherwise be taboo. Giuseppe Pucci calls
this disorderly affair “the ritualization of primordial chaos that
precedes creation” (44). The people took an uncertain and
transitional period and transfigured it into a celebration.
The Roman Catholic Carnival so closely resembles the
structure of the ancient Saturnalia that most historians agree that
Carnival is directly modeled from the earlier celebration. Klarer
elaborates on the ritual similarities between the two festivals. He
quotes Mikhail Bakhtin to clarify these connections: “the tradition
of the Saturnalias remained unbroken and alive in the medieval
carnival, which expressed this universal renewal and was vividly
felt as an escape from the usual official way of life” (qtd. in Klarer
402). Similarities between the two festivals and this “escape” to
which Bakhtin refers include the inversion of societal and
hierarchal roles, an abandonment of social norms, cannibalism
and human sacrifice (Klarer 401, 402). What was once a
“ritualization of primordial chaos” for those who partook in the
Saturnalia became a similar means to quarantine disorder with
Carnival, which would eventually become a spectacle under the
close supervision of the Church.
The ritualized and cyclical nature of the Saturnalian
perspective on life, death and time was one that was transfused
into Carnival. Klarer investigates the seventeenth century affinity
for the self-sustaining and perceived “cosmic wholeness” that
ritual sacrifice and cannibalism seemed to provide (398). Referring
to the Last Supper and the concept of “incorporation” as means
to achieve unity with God and the universe, Klarer writes, “the
cannibalistic deep-structure of Christian tradition is thus indirectly
Saturn Devouring his Son

reflected in the carnival of early modern times” (403). This

illustrates how truly pervasive pre-Christian ritual and myth are
in the more modern religious and social structures of Europe.
As a “cosmic wholeness” and cyclic sustainability could
be achieved through incorporation and ritual sacrifice, Klarer
notes that the sixteenth century experienced a “revival” of interest
in cannibalism and ritual celebrations that lent a great deal to the 17
structure and formation of the festival, Carnival (400). In fact, the
sixteenth century fascination with “wholeness” was not limited
to pre-Christian celebrations, such as the Saturnalia, that endorsed
 that thinking, but also included the myths of the Golden Age that

were the foundation for some of these festivities (Georgievska-

Shine 54, 55). The myths seem to represent a sublime purity and
18
“an earlier state of symmetry” for which the academics and artists

of the 1600s were nostalgic (Georgievska-Shine 54). This was

manifested in the Baroque practice of classical imitation and an

almost obsessive depiction and re-depiction of the Golden Age

through their art.

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Rubens, who was born in Germany in 1577 to a well

educated and a philosophically opinionated father, was never far

from this academic interest and discourse that was circulating

through sixteenth century Europe (Stubbe 7). Like most artists of

the decadent Baroque period, he traveled to Rome for his formal

training in the arts (Georgievska-Shine 2). Thus many of his

artistic, philosophical and intellectual perspectives were shaped

by his education in Italy, a place that seemed to enact the very

decadence that was typical of its art (Malraux 78). Additionally,

this means that he was immersed in the country’s fascination

with ritualized ceremony, Carnival and the utopian “wholeness”

that was so desired at the time.

While Rubens is known primarily for his art, he managed

to work his way into nearly every niche of high society,

accumulating many hobbies and duties including, “a painter,

antiquarian, diplomat and courtier” (Georgievska-Shine 2). It is

important to note that Rubens was a court painter, meaning the

majority of his work was painted on commission. However, this

does not mean that Rubens was not profoundly interested in the
myths of the Golden Age.2
His Saturn Devouring his Son is painted with a profundity
of style that speaks to the reverence of myth in the Baroque period.
Rubens’ Saturn is old, but clearly powerful; his muscular legs
stand sturdily on either a hill of stones, or a mountain of clouds.
His menacing posture in conjunction with the dark sky behind
him lend the sense that the elements are at his will. Even the
night sky is reacting to his wrath. In his arms the infant has an
expression of anguish (logically), as the god rips the skin from
his chest. The scythe in his other hand only adds to his thunderous
power. The highlighted musculature, proportional depiction of
the human body as well as the resplendent style of the painting
are consistent with Baroque practice and lend to the glorified
representation of the myth.
Taking into consideration the style of the representation,
Rubens’ own love for classicism as well as the academic and
philosophical environment in which Rubens immersed himself,
Saturn Devouring his Son

this version of Saturn Devouring his Son represents an admiration

for the sublimity of the myth of Saturn. These tales of gods that
existed before the beginning of time in a “primordial chaos”
certainly speak to Kristeva’s conception of the sublime. Hers is a

2
This is reinforced by a correspondence with a friend that is recorded
in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens. Here he thanks his friend for send-
ing him a box that is apparently full of antiquated mysteries. Gratefully 19
he writes, “it has given me the utmost pleasure, for it is full of rare
things worthy of the closest examination...The large glass vase is in-
deed a superb monument of antiquity” (401). He continues with his
conjectures on the figures represented on the vase, but his enthusiasm
and genuine love of the subject is evident in the exchange.
 “pre-nominal” and “pre-objectal” phenomenon that, while we

cannot access it abstractly, for it is out of symbolic bounds, still

invokes a sensation of fullness, and an inarticulable “wholeness.”

20
For the participants in the Saturnalia, Carnival and those with a

renewed interest in classic myth, this same sensation of

“wholeness,” or a divine circularity, seems to be the driving force

behind their infatuation. The actual acts of cannibalism and

infanticide were not necessarily the focal point of Rubens’

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veneration, it was the suggestion of sublimity and perpetual

sustainability behind the myth that seduced Rubens and his peers.

Klarer calls the idea of incorporation as a means to achieve

some transcendent relationship with the universe one that is

“subliminally regenerative” (403). Connecting that with the myth

of Saturn and his incorporation of his children creates an entirely

self-sustaining and “pure” system of being, one in which there is

no symbolic separation of the self from the rest of the world as

Kristeva details. In this way, Rubens’ Saturn Devouring his Son

becomes a conceptual and physical vestige of that pre-symbolic

state; a means to access the chimeric sublime.

Just as Rubens’ Saturn is shaped by a collective nostalgia

for this perceived access to the sublime, Goya’s Saturn is a

reflection of the social and cultural reasoning in which he lived

and worked. For the myth of Saturn and its associated traditions,

this meant a philosophical inversion from the grand to the

grotesque, the festival of Carnival to the carnivalesque spectacle,

the sublime to the abject, and for our purposes, a movement from

Italy to Spain.
Stoichita and Coderch note that the Roman Carnival was
banned in Italy after the French Revolution in the late 1700s only
to be reinstated in the early 1800s (12). It was during this time
that a cultural shift took place making Carnival more of spectacle
than a celebration. “Carnival, which should in principle have
erased all boundaries between spectators and actors...has lost
something of its all-encompassing power and therefore, implicitly,
something of its innermost being. Hence the festival is turned
into something it was not: a show” (11-12). By refiguring Carnival
as a performance, participation is limited to the performers. In
this way their behavior is singled out as obscene and the spectacle
becomes a means to quarantine disorder or provide a moral lesson.
Arthur Mitzman reinforces this symbolic inversion in his
essay, “Michelet and Social Romanticism: Religion, Revolution,
Nature,” when he observes a revival of the “grotesque humor” of
Saturn Devouring his Son

the Carnival (665). While Mitzman is celebrating a return of

Carnival in the 1800s, referring to it as “grotesque” does not situate
the celebration as a serious and meaningful tradition, rather it
connotes that Carnival had become more of an outrageous
performance that served to reinforce the symbolic order, rather
than subvert it.
The metamorphosis of Carnival is telling of a larger cultural 21
struggle between Roman tradition and the Catholic church. André
Malraux summarizes Spain’s combined admiration for and
rejection of Italy’s decadence. He says, “it cannot be doubted that
 Spanish artists were impatient of the influence exercised by Italian
art. They had come to terms with the baroque ecstasies where
sensuality and spirituality met; but in Italy they met in sensuality
22
whereas Spain had always wanted to unite them in God” (78). He
writes about the harsh censorship that was enforced in Spain, for
which Goya had narrowly escaped persecution several times in
his career as a painter.
Goya (like Rubens) was officially declared a court painter
in 1786 (Muller 22). This meant that as a liberal thinker and often
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satirical painter, Goya was uncomfortably straddling the divide

between the tumultuous, political side of Spain, always deeply
affected by the Church, and his own morality as an individual.
Thus Goya’s position in his home country was not unlike that of
Carnival’s, fraught with tension and conflicting values. Carnival,
like the Saturnalia, has been regarded as a festival of inversion of
social values; one that is culturally and politically subversive—
even revolutionary (Stoichita and Coderch 23). For that reason,
in a time when the Church was fighting for control, the disorderly
and indulgent traditions of Carnival posed a logical threat to that
ascendance. Robert Hughes calls the imposition of the Church a
“dominant anxiety” in Goya’s life (4). He extrapolates: “the
obsession with papal authority, and the concomitant power of
the Church, was even greater, and to openly criticize either in
Spain was not devoid of serious risk” (4). As Goya grew more
and more resistant to religious and political authority, he
experienced firsthand the consequences of that risk resulting with
his exile to France in 1824, only a couple of years after historians
estimate that he painted Saturn Devouring his Son (Hughes 366).
 Living amidst the toils of the Peninsular War and the final
decades of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya was no stranger to
tragedy and trauma (Muller 174). Additionally, the artist suffered
several nearly fatal illnesses, one of which resulted in his loss of
hearing two decades before his death (Muller 11, 23). The
progression from a pristine, classical style that we see in much of
his earlier work to the heavier, darker content and style that
pervaded much of his later painting seems to speak to the weight
of the troubles he had endured throughout his life.3 In 1819 Goya
moved to the isolated Quinta del Sordo, or ‘home of the deaf
man’ (coincidentally named as such even before Goya bought it),
in the Spanish countryside (Muller 11). It was here that Goya
painted his famous “Black Paintings,” or fourteen dark murals
on the walls of his country home; one of which was Saturn
Devouring his Son.
Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son confronts its audience
with a subhuman Saturn that is feasting on his already partially
devoured son. This son, however, is certainly not an infant as the
Saturn Devouring his Son

myth and Rubens’ painting detail; it is a full grown (and

ambiguously gendered) body. The corpse in Saturn’s hands takes
on a neoclassical style that is more reminiscent of Rubens’ time
period than it is Goya’s— anatomically and artistically more
Baroque. The “son” along with Saturn’s eyes are the primary

3
Goya expressed in one of his correspondences, “I’ll have you know,
I’m not afraid of witches, spirits, phantoms, boastful giants, rogues 23
knaves, etc., nor do I fear any kind of beings except human ones” (qtd.
in Warner 256). Implicit in this mentality is Goya’s rejection of what
has been accepted as rational within the symbolic sphere. He conveys
a collapse of order, which posits man as the threat where “witches”
and “phantoms” would rationally be the object of fear.
 points of light in the piece, while the rest of the painting remains
obscured by shadows and blurred lines between lights and darks.
Saturn is crouching in the darkness, and whether he is receding
24
into or emerging from the shadows is not clear. His wide eyes are
filled with a sense of alarm that gives the painting a voyeuristic
quality—as though the viewers have happened upon a scene that
they were never meant to see (which may very well be true
considering that Goya painted the piece on a wall of his isolated
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country home). Saturn’s upturned eyebrows in conjunction with

his shocked eyes express shame or shock. With stringy gray hair
and an awkward, disproportionate body, this Saturn hardly evokes
the same sensation of grandeur and godliness that Rubens’ does.
Rather, Goya’s Saturn seems discarded, even desperate.
Taking into consideration the evolution of traditions such
as Carnival and the growing imposition of the values of the Church
in Goya’s Spain, this inglorious depiction of Saturn is not
surprising. Spain’s internal turmoil is reflected in Saturn’s
expression as we witness him guiltily devouring the sensuality
of the Baroque. The figure embodies a symbolic collapse between
decadence and shame. However, the viewer is not exempt from
this transgression, as Saturn’s startled eyes humble his observer
for indulging in the private scene. This instability serves to upset
the viewer’s comfortable status as spectator by exposing and
collapsing the symbolic wall that separates the audience from
the ghastly scene. Saturn’s piercing gaze muddles the role of
spectator and spectacle, and by extension, critiques their utility
as a symbolic reinforcer under the reign of the Church.
 Carnival had become more of a “show,” with clearly
enforced norms for a celebration that was once structured around
the very idea of collapsing social and categorical borders. This
worked to bolster the symbolic regiment of the Church by reifying
what threatened its order. In creating the symbolic wall between
spectators and performers, the festival was no longer about a
sublime unity, rather it was a well defined symbolic distinction
between the grotesque, or “carnivalesque,” and the norm. Goya’s
Saturn exposes this transformation by collapsing the boundary
between the spectator and the spectacle. The voyeuristic feel the
painting imbues arrests the viewer in a reciprocal relationship
with Saturn that invokes the same shame in the voyeur as we see
on the face of the figure; the spectator becomes the spectacle.
Saturn’s gaze demands that the viewer is painfully self-conscious
of his or her of complicity in the vile scene that defiles the
sacredness and authority of the symbolic realm.
This myth that once suggested a “subliminally
Saturn Devouring his Son

regenerative” state, becomes the abject. The notional self-

sustainability that is inherent in this act of eating one’s own child
now seems to threaten the solace of borderlines, propelling one
into the “pre-nominal” and “pre-objectal” boundlessness of the
abject. When Kristeva asks, “how can I be without border?” she
encapsulates our craving to stake out a symbolic territory (4).
The sublime “wholeness” or unity of an individual with the 25
“primordial chaos” of the universe that was once sought out now
seems to threaten the ego’s sense of place within the symbolic
order. This collapse of borderlines is embodied in the painting’s
 formal makeup that disintegrates those lines literally and
figuratively. By obscuring the lines between light and dark,
between background and foreground, spectacle and spectator,
26 even Saturn and his son, the viewer cannot detect any clean
borders that would lessen the mystery of the painting, and soften
the uncomfortable confrontation with the abject.
Kristeva unravels the contradictions of the abject. She says
abjection is “a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion
that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who
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sells you up, a friend who stabs you...” (4). Abjection then is
something that we do not have the symbolic resources to provide
for. Its simultaneity and inherent contradictions do not allow for
borders. The idea of a father who devours his own children would
fall into that category. Everything about this combined act of
cannibalism and infanticide threaten those boundaries that we
are predisposed, by the logic of the symbolic realm, to desire.
Rubens’ depiction of Saturn Devouring his Son exalts a
“sublime wholeness;” an idealized picture of self-sustainability
and unity with the universe. Implicit in this “wholeness” is the
lack of boundaries that became so threatening in Goya’s time,
thus marking the transition of the sublime to the abject. Abjection
is a product of ambiguity, where symbolic law and order fail to
sustain the ego. Thus the abjection of Goya’s Saturn is not only
enacted by the visuality of the painting, but by the suggestion of
the collapse of symbolic authority. That order is collapsed in
Goya’s painting by its exposure of Spain’s tempting and shameful
indulgence in decadence, the Church’s invention of symbolic
“borders,” and the spectacle of Carnival. This collapse emphasizes
the vulnerabilities of the symbolic realm. Through its unveiling
of the boundaries that sustain the ego, it challenges their validity
and the mentalities that call them into being. As Kristeva says,
“the same subject and speech bring [sublimity and abjection] into
being” (11-12). Therefore, the last and most captivating piece of
the sublime and the abject is their inherent simultaneity. This
makes them indistinguishable, devastating and enthralling.

Works Cited

Coronato, Rocco. Jonson Versus Bakhtin: Carnival and the

Grotesque. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Print.
Gassier, Pierre. Goya: Biographical and Critical Study. New York:
Skira, 1955. Print.
Georgievska-Shine, Aneta. Rubens and the Archaeology of
Myth, 1610-1620: Visual and Poetic Memory.
Farnham, England: Ashgate Pub. Co, 2009. Print.
Goya, Francisco. Saturn Devouring his Son. 1820-1823.
Museo del Prado, Madrid. Painting.
Hughes, Robert, and Francisco Goya. Goya. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Print.
Klarer, Mario. “Cannibalism and Carnivalesque:
Incorporation As Utopia in the Early Image of
America.” New Literary History. 30.2 (1999): 389-410. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
Saturn Devouring his Son

New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

Malraux, André. Saturn: An Essay on Goya. London:
Phaidon Press, 1957. Print.
Muller, Priscilla E. Goya’s “black” Paintings: Truth and
Reason in Light and Liberty. New York:
Hispanic Society of America, 1984. Print.
Pucci, Giuseppe. “Roman Saturn: the Shady Side.”
Saturn: From Antiquity to the Renaissance. Ed. M. Ciavolella. S.l.:
Medieval & Renaissance, 1994. Print.
Rubens, Peter P. Saturn Devouring his Son. c 1636. Museo
del Prado, Madrid. Painting. 27
Rubens, Peter P. The Letters of Sir Peter Paul Rubens.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. Print.
Stubbe, Achilles. Peter Paul Rubens. New York: Barnes & Noble,
1966. Print.
 LUCAS ANDINO
Lucas Andino is an Ecuadorian student
of comparative literature and philoso-
phy. His primary interest--if not his
only interest-- is poetry. He identifies
with Adonis: “The world to come will
be [scatalogically] poetic or it will not
be.”

Nomad Prize for Excellence in

Undergraduate Scholarship:
Honorable Mention

Mentor: Emily McGinn

TO SHIT AS GINSBURG

“You can turn your shit into gold”

Alejandro Jodorowski
The Holy Mountain

T his article puts forth a rather disgusting theme that, by its recurrence
and banality, could become annoying. The disgustingness, however,
comes from the violent ambiguity of the subject that “is both naturally
present but, in most cases, socially absent,” and from the consequent
social disorder that is provoked by the separation of human waste “from
the individual who created it, and from the society that rejects it” (Persells
xiv). Tackling shit though, or, rather, welcoming it, implies a
commitment to heal such disorder because it engages the very
sustenance of the individual, as it finds itself socially repressed
from developing its scatological capacities. Taking shit seriously,
being critical about it, involves a movement that is the opposite
of what modernity has made of it. Rather than shallowly taking
shit as an expulsion and erasing it as if it were a mere reflex, one
is to make space for it to be welcomed as a returning citizen.
Shit stands as the most execrable animal product for it
contains all the residues of digestion. “What cannot be used from
the consumed foods and drinks descends into a person’s lower
intestines, changes itself into excrement…and is evacuated by
the body” (Lewin vii), says Hildegard von Bingen in one of the
earliest Western medical treatises, dating from around 1155. The
concept of shit takes on the connotation of physiological rejection
alone without admitting any other possible definitions. It
disacknowledges, for example, the original experience of creation
To Shit as Ginsberg

and the irreducible link with its creator. By relying on physiology,

the definition becomes inviolable because nature is a given force
that entangles humans. Indeed, the body can do nothing with
shit once expelled and if reinserted in the food chain its high
toxicity could only cause damage, although this is not the case
for many animals, such as rabbits, gorillas, dogs, among others.
This limited connotation (bound to repulsion as a reflex of self- 29
preservation) is useful to explain our mechanical functions but is
instantly invalid when socially enmeshed, as it repels people from
one another. Repulsion of shit is, in the long run, repulsion of the
 self. Considering shit an expression of rejection thus contains
peril, for it contradicts any political project, any collectivity.
Not all epochs have defined shit in the same way. In
30
antiquity, the Greeks had no trouble relating shit with sublimity,
for in the main seats of the agora a basin was incorporated in
order to enhance the moment of catharsis of a play. The moment
of emotional liberation, the catharsis, was maximized by
synchronizing it with the release of a dump, thus taking shit as a
nomad

sublime experience. The Romans had public toilets that could

host more than fifty people in which they held social gatherings.
Nowadays, however, the mere mention of shitting as a social
practice could instantly produce laughter, if not gagging. The
condescending laughter of moderns who regard any past practice
as ignorance, and the gagging of someone so embedded in such
laughter, have somaticized the prejudice against shit. Such reflexes
affirm the deep, unconscious, roots of our shit.
Nature loses its preeminence when mastered by reason
and technique in modernity. Incapable of providing meaning to
class power, nature is relegated to the underground as if an
illegitimate experience. But reason and technique are correlative
to nature because the mind is entangled in nature. Even though it
has been cast out by modernity nature reappears by necessity,
though as a negative counterpart of the mind that negates its origin.
Modernity encompasses shit as negativity and cleanliness, its
reasoned antidote, becomes the superimposed value. Cleanliness
is the lack of shit, hence the modern place of zero danger, the
barbed wired house in which cowardice is safe. But the lack is
only apparent in the totalized mind because shit, like nature, is
inextricable.
Modernity can be reduced to an institutionalization of
cleanliness (as a movement of separateness) in all areas. The
making of censuses, for example, is a method of identifying the
unwanted (the unproductive) and consequently pushing such
parasites to work, if not disposing them in war. The
institutionalization of cleanliness is also highly verifiable when
looking at language institutions. The slogan ‘Cleans, sets and casts
splendor,’ however fitting for a detergent is, in actuality, the motto
of the Royal Spanish Academy. In other words, the academy’s
work is to extricate language, to dictate and make it opulent.
Language academies are the most effective institutions in
modernity, if not the best, for they command the frame for the
development of discourse. Denial and veiling of shit extends to
every particle of language.
The cleaning of the tools with which any discourse is
To Shit as Ginsberg

developed—words and syntax—has decisive consequences in

other spheres. Here is an example of how the manipulation of
language engages the sphere of politics. In August of 1539, in
France, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets mandated that all official
documents were to be cleansed of all ambiguities or uncertainties
by means of their translation into ‘proper’ French. In November
of the same year, the King ordered another edict in which he 31
expressed his disgust towards Paris, “which has in a great many
places so degenerated into ruin and destruction… that it provokes
great horror and greater displeasure in all valiant persons of
 substance. These scandalous and dishonorable acts are the work

of corrupted individuals who sojourn and assemble in this our

city and its surroundings” (Laporte 4-5). The anteriority of the

32
language edict suggests cleanliness as a precondition in the way

of thinking before realizing the dirtiness of urban surroundings.

Repercussions of the institutionalization of cleanliness can

also be traced in the sphere of art with the appearance of the first

scatological writer of modernity, Rabelais. If art is considered a

nomad

movement of criticism, such repercussions occur here as a revolt

against this cleanliness. Rabelais’s constant and unrestrained

scatological references make his writing a denunciation of the

institutional banning of shit and, at the same time, the

documentation of a disrupted order in the sphere of language.

There is a passage from Gargantua and Pantagruel that documents

rather palpably the interruption of modern discourse into the act

of shitting. “Then [after reading the Scriptures] he [Gargantua]

would go off and, in some private place, permit the natural result

of his digestive process to be excreted. While he was thus

occupied, his teacher would repeat what had been read to him,

clarifying and explaining the more obscure and difficult points”

(57). Before this passage, Gargantua defecated in ‘improper places,’

thus it is only by God’s guidance (reading the Scriptures) and

modern education (the preceptor) that cleanliness and privacy

become the proper way of shitting. The obsessive determination

of the preceptor to hammer knowledge into Gargantua’s mind

denounces the violence of the modern project of cleanliness. By

means of satire the counter-part of cleanliness is raised by art and
with it lies the longing for an order that has been disrupted.
Cleanliness can be further traced to Platonism or what
could be called the history of nihilism. Besides killing himself,
Socrates also killed the mythic world by enacting Plato’s words
in which he gives to Western thinking the theory of forms. Forms
are posited as the true world, transcendent, and thus are put above
the earthly world, a physic beyond the physic, a metaphysic.
Western knowledge is conceived in this lofty incubator and
concentrates in the broadest form of God. With such ‘grounding’
a short step remains to start polishing that new created world by
means of casting away all elements that are unpleasant to the
historic context or, better, distasteful to the subjectivity of the
author. While Socrates, in Plato’s Parmenides, is explaining the
theory of forms to Parmenides, the latter interrupts to ask if “hair,
for instance, or mud, or dirt, or anything else notably vile and
worthless” has a distinct form. “By no means,” jumps Socrates,
To Shit as Ginsberg

“in these cases, the things are what we see them to be; to believe
in a form of them would perhaps be too much of a paradox”
(Parmenides 50-51). Ideal forms are too ‘beautiful’ to have to do
with such lowly matters. It is needless to say what would have
happened if Parmenides had mentioned shit, though mud already
connotes a similar meaning. Whatever is considered lowly in the
origins of culture is cast aside from the future to come. A pure
33
and sanitized new God is construed in opposition to earthly
matters and the body becomes the place of defilement par
excellence. “…It isn’t possible to recognize anything at all purely
 when in company with the body” (38), says the Socrates of the
Phaedo.
Modernity is often described as a systematic human
34
appropriation of God—meaning with ‘systematic’ a rationalization
of language, a progression of logic (Taylor 20). Thus whatever
high ideal was put before, would be transmitted when
appropriated, or dissolved, secularized, declined. The ascetic
Platonic God is what is transposed to the human conception in
nomad

modernity. Hence a God of cleanliness commands from within

the modern self and makes of its nature its politics. Its ‘highest’
achievement: the cleaning of language. Its fatal consequence: social
cleansing in the forms of extermination and colonization. Cleaning
of language has to appear first in the form of an abrupt disruption
in order to make a space in discourse that could later justify a
politics of radical segregation.
In the figure of Nietzsche, Platonism ends or, likewise,
nihilism takes complete form and any hard truth (or value)
vanishes from landscape. The ‘true world that became a fable’
can be interpreted as a death of cleanliness as historically
understood. In turn, the task that is put forth is the revaluation of
the body. Assuming this task results in the cutting of any
relationship with truth, i.e. with God, and individuals are pushed
towards the seeking of metaphors that engage the body.
Scatological literature assumes such a task with commitment.
Rabelais was mentioned before as the first modern
scatological writer. Throughout modernity there is a long tradition
of writing about shit that ranges from John Dryden to Jonathan
Swift, from the Marquis de Sade to the Comte de Lautréamont. In
the 20th century many great poets, such as Céline or Bukowski,
are scatologists, but it is Allen Ginsberg who sums up the demoted
tradition in one empowering moan. Usually regarded as ‘obscene,’
Ginsberg’s language encountered opposition in many of the places
where it was displayed. His poem “Howl,” for example, resulted
in what is now called the Obscenity Trial where he had to defend
himself against charges of writing about ‘illicit’ practices, namely
drugs and sodomy. Throughout his work there are scatological
references that range from rebellious to political to a notion of
knowledge. The latter is the most interesting type.
In Ginsberg’s early period, before “Howl,” there is already
an interest in excrement and all its surrounding elements. A diary
entry dating from November 13, 1946, has the title “Scatological
Trimmings.” He does not register the actual fact of shitting or the
shit itself, but there is a dialogue between his own visceral
movements and the context in which they rise. One such trimming
To Shit as Ginsberg

reads, “7. Visual image of forcing out feces and masturbation

(flexing penis muscles). This to do with defilement and fear of
pants with buttons which kept shitting near me, against me” (The
Book of Martyrdom 152). These private notes, ennumerated and
disengaged, work as a labor of poetic self-consciousness. There
are no conclusions offered in the entry, only registrations, as if he
were a detective collecting data.
35
Further, in his poem of 1950, “The Terms in Which I Think
of Reality,” there already exists a development of shit as a
metaphor linked to knowledge. The very title of the poem declares
 a cognitive ambition and when shit makes its appearance it is the
whole world that is put at stake. “For the world is a mountain / of
shit: if it’s going to / be moved at all, it’s got / to be taken by
36
handfuls”, says Ginsberg (Collected Poems 59). Indeed, the world
is described neutrally as a mountain of feces and could be
interpreted as an apprehensible magma out of which reality is
made. The second part of the quoted lines, however, weakens the
interpretation of the first ones, for a certain humor is inserted
nomad

when Ginsberg mocks the proverb that prescribes faith as capable

of moving mountains. The strength of scatology as a font of
knowledge is presented here in its incomplete potentiality because
it has an immature form, as it is iconoclastic just for the sake of
being so.
Under the shade of “Howl,” as if an intermediate period,
shit plays again a major role in the poem “September on Jessore
Road.” The poem talks about the pain of poverty and war and
yells for justice as it holds the U.S. government responsible for
Vietnam. Shit here rises as a political value, and the harshness of
the word works as an impetus to support the accusation and the
taking of sides. “Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d
lair?” (Collected Poems 582) asks the poem. Later it describes
how cries “[Sleep] in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain”
(Collected Poems 582). The political content of the poem makes
shit a material of rebellion, as at this point shit is deprived from
immaturity and leads to a more serious consideration.
It is in the threshold of death, twelve days before Ginsberg
dies, that one finds shit unleashed to its maximum capacity.
“Scatological Observations,” written in March 23, 1997, curiously
recalls Ginsberg’s early notations as he made his route towards
becoming a big figure. Major poets usually know from early on
what they are seeking and thus they have very few themes. The
poem could be considered a song, as its rigid structure of four-
line stanzas composed with rhyme and chorus repeats in order
to fit musical accompaniment. If one is to consider Ginsberg’s
intensive relationship with Buddhism, the repetition and
hypnotizing rhyme could also be interpreted as a peculiar mantra,
removed from its Sanskrit and thematic tradition (not known for
including shit) and put forth with the particular use of language
of the author. Mantras are repetitive schemes of words that push
for individual transformation and, even though they come from
a long Vedic tradition, there is no reason as to why mantras today
are not useful or cannot be newly created. Due to its radical
commitment to shitting, the poem brings about multiple
interpretations that are articulated in the discussion developed
To Shit as Ginsberg

so far.1
In the first stanza there is already a straightforward
criticism of shit as obscenity. “Young romantic readers / Skip
this part of the book” (Collected Poems 1147) are the first two
lines. Only romantic consciousness, in its overflowing and thus
its superimposition, could feel ashamed of the hard reality of
shit and should avoid reading the poem. “If you want a glimpse
37
of life / You’re free to take a look” it continues. Shit is correlated
with freedom, life and reality, while its negative side, repression,
2
See the appendix for a complete look at the poem.
 avoidance of life and cleanliness, is regarded as a romantic
superimposition.
Though it may seem that the poem embraces a sort of
38
futurist love of the machine (“Shit machine shit machine / I’m an
incredible shit machine”), in actuality the chorus uses the machine
as an adjective. Ginsberg’s familiarity with street language explains
it better, as it merely poses the machine as being a radically good
shitter and pisser. By the repetition of the phrases there is a
hammering of the ‘I’, and by the awkwardness of the prosaic
nomad

element in a poem it exercises and suggests freedom of the self-

affirmed ‘I’. Shitting thus stands as a metaphor of maximum
individual sovereignty, emphasized by the hyperboles ‘incredible’
and ‘inexhaustible.’
By proposing a cherished state of shitting, the poem
articulates an ethical position. There is no formula as to how to
shit well or what is a good shit because any such proposal would
mean a standard common to everybody and it was already
affirmed that absolute values are not applicable, as they are a
cleaning procedure summarized in the history of nihilism. This
history has eroded our concept of ethics to the point that all we
are left with is our own subjectivity by which to judge our actions.
This, however, is not an openness to chaos, for there is a rigorous
reduction of options by means of predicting the effects of shitting.
To shit well is to feel emotionally well, thus if one feels
emotionally well it is due to a good shit. One is compelled to be
extremely aware of what were the different actions made that
produced an emotional state of bliss or misery. In this sense there
is a negative and positive reduction of options insomuch a misery
discards actions from the future and a bliss produces repetition
of past actions, i.e. infinite affirmation. Distinctive procedures
can be identified and transformed into a rule for further actions,
yielding ethical rules, thus a middle path or Golden Mean
suggested in the third stanza (“Piss & shit machine / That’s the
Golden Mean”). The Aristotelian formula of the Golden Mean,
which is a balancing between excess and deficiency in order to
achieve virtue, is grounded here in an ethics of shitting. So pulled
to the earth is Aristotle here that the very act of shitting becomes
the virtue: shitting is virtuosity. Far from Western philosophy, a
theory of a middle path is also offered in the Buddhist System of
the Middle Way and most prominently in Confucianism. The
Golden Mean thus is carefully picked by Ginsberg in order to
convey a sort of universal ethics (every living creature shits) that
is, nevertheless, very particular (shitting can only be made by the
individual concerned).
To make of shitting a source of ethical knowledge, or any
other type of knowledge, by the premise of a ‘Golden Shitting’
To Shit as Ginsberg

brings a paradox to the argument. If values crumble with the

disappearance of truth or God, why then should metaphors of
shit be valuable? The paradox is unresolved not only for this poem
and paper but to the story of nihilism as well. Postmodernism, as
rising from nihilism’s fulfillment on, struggles with this
irresoluteness that almost recommends dwelling in supreme
banality. The paradox resembles that of Buridan’s ass, who died 39
of thirst and hunger when placed midway between a stack of hay
and a bucket of water. If we are to extend the anecdote, political
matters get even worse, for they involves the death of the
 collective. Indeed, as Joshua D. Esty has noted in his article
Excremental Postcolonialism, suggesting shit or any universality
is a peril because it can both represent and resist power. Esty
40
makes an analysis of vulgar images and suggests a “radical
ambiguity of scatology” (26). Since shit is a paradox, it can only
be sustained negatively as being the subject that opposes more
thoroughly God or monotheism. Thus shit can never be taken at
its face value and all its metaphors (values) are to be movements
that get near (without ever concretizing) to what is historically
nomad

innocent and devalued, i.e. the body. Values are negated their
supremacy, though granted their being as nearness. Being as
nearness is an irresolute being; the nearest to a solution,
nonetheless. Since a poem is a written form, in the end an
objectification, Ginsberg has no other choice but to nominalize
this shifting (getting close to resolution) character of shitting in
the static formula of Golden Mean.
Discourse, from this perspective, appears as a stream of
metaphors swiftly moving above the oil, but some, like the very
shit, are so significantly charged and near to the body that the ad-
infinitum chain of metaphors (words that are defined by other
words that are themselves defined by other words, i.e. the whole
language) reaches its limit and slows. When this occurs it is as if
a certain part of the pointed referent is materially substituted by
discourse, as if touched, becoming a metonymy. This substitution

2
Rodney Sharkey, in his article From Hardware to Software, or “Rocks,
Cocks, Creation, Defecation, and Death...”, explores the creativity (the bringing
to corporeal life) of shit by anchoring his argument in a concept of metaphor as
magic that he takes from Thomas Docherty.
is a leap that may always purport insufficient explanations from
any viewpoint and could only be called magic2. A tangential
explanation could be that when mentioning these metonymys;
all the signifiers they convey focally point to the subject they
deal with, interpretations thus get reduced to the very least and
the agreement of what their images express is so tense that even
matter feels interpolated. Hence ‘truth’, in a devalued or weak
sense, is the metonymyzation of discourse that is capable of
touching matter. The insistent repetition of the chorus of our poem
could be explained as an attempt to modify matter by the
incantation of words. A magic formula, a mantra that speaks to
the invoked material.
The poem contains a series of comparisons (“whether
young or old,” “brown or black or green,” “hard or soft or loose,”
“babe or boy or youth,” “baby girl or maid”) that brings into focus
the broad applicability of shit. Shit, like the rose that blooms, is
one of the metaphors that conveys more signifiers because it is
an ending stage—eschatos in Greek means last—where everything
To Shit as Ginsberg

converges. Nevertheless, signifiers of the rose are much inclined

to literalism, while shit has a bolder reality because it is literarily
and colloquially charged. This broad range of connotations adds
to the elementality of shit. Its boldness brings to bear the rough
superficiality of materiality and the deepness of a mystery, as it is
intricately involved in literature. “…When written”, says Barthes,
“shit does not have an odor” (137), describing the unreachability 41
of an object that is strongly visible.
The describing of shit as a universality brings to presence
not only that shit is a source of knowledge, but of predictability
 as well. Any archeologist knows that in order to know a given
culture the best place to look at is its landfill. Everything that was
once useful is placed there, from food to technology, with the
42
only problem that everything is scrambled and class struggle is
erased. Trash and shit are like death, as they both equalize
humanity. (Death, nonetheless, remains the protagonist of the
proverb because the meanings of shit and trash deviate once
interpreted, while death is liminal.) Insomuch as shit contains
all residues from what is consumed by the body it resembles a
nomad

landfill and if one had the capacity to interpret its footprint—by

means of observing, for example, its particular consistency and
coloration3—, then one would be able to read the eternity in the
present. “Everything will be seen,” asserts the poem.
Ginsberg’s commitment to the body is radical and verified
in an extreme conciseness: “Fuck fart shit Piss / It all comes down
to this.” His words violently demand em-bodying knowledge, as
he is conscious of the derivative dangers of God and its cleaning
attitude. Thus he continues with transgressions of religious
references in order to sever any relationship with God. In
“Beautiful male Madonnas” virginal Mary is transexualized. In
“Wrathful Maids of Honor” the institution of marriage is a place
of enmity rather than communion. Such is Ginberg’s confidence
in the body that he concludes these two transgressive lines with
“To be frank & Honest / Stink the watercloset”. These could be
interpreted as a callow use of shit, as if he were recommending

3
As an example, this is what the protagonist of Ruben Fonseca’s story
Copromancy does.
‘to damage everything’, but if one is to consider Ginsberg’s long
history of political activism then it is highly unlikely he is
advocating for chaos; his continuous political taking of sides
delegitimizes such interpretation. If we are to shit as Ginsberg
then to ‘stink the watercloset’ or, even, ‘stink on everything’ is
not a soiling but an all-inclusive celebration.
The poem ends with the repetitive enunciation of the word
shit (and piss) along with some tautological lines, namely
“Nature’s not obscene” and “Nature never wrong.” Indeed, nature
is a given element that cannot be judged morally. By mentioning
it, though, Ginsberg emphasizes the complete forgetfulness of the
body and denounces the overlapping of a clean nature, to the
point that the primeval one turns unconsciously obscene and
wrong.
A mantra with the correct choice of words, like the one
Ginsberg offers, metonymyzises language and is able to liberate
shit from its keeper that rejects it. It does not speak, however, to
To Shit as Ginsberg

the creation, but to the creator and literally shakes out of her/him
the reversal of everything contained in its uttermost rejection.
Only by inversion can shit be neutrally, if not blissfully, ejected.
Paradoxically enough, an ejection without rejection: shit is the
path to virtue. ‘Stink on everything’, pounds Ginsberg, and indeed
we must, for political implications of this standpoint could only
mean the depletion of modernity and its teleology of human
43
repulsion. Modernity is construed by the superimposition and
moratoria of the body while a radical commitment to shit implies
the infesting of the body at every point. Thus confidence in shit
 must be retained because it holds at its center the origins of any
weakened truth and is opposed to what modern catastrophe has
produced. Unless one takes sides with a politics of miserable
44
shitting, then knowledge, that is ultimately a problem of origin,
cannot move toward cleanliness and its annihilating
consequences, but rather toward inclusivity.
nomad

Appendix

Scatological Observations

The Ass knows more than the mind knows

Young romantic readers

Skip this part of the book

If you want a glimpse of life

You’re free to take a look

Shit machine shit machine

I’m an incredible shit machine

Piss machine Piss machine

Inexhaustible piss machine

Piss & shit machine

That’s the Golden Mean

Whether young or old

Move your bowels of Gold

Piss & shit machine

It always comes out clean

Whether you’re old or young

Never hold your tongue

Chorus

Shit machine piss machine

I’m an incredible piss machine

Piss machine piss machine

Inexhaustible shit machine.

Brown or black or green

everything will be seen

hard or soft or loose

shit’s a glimpse of truth To Shit as Ginsberg

Babe or boy or youth

Fart’s without a tooth

baby girl or maid

Many a fart in laid

Shit piss shit piss

fuck & shit & piss 45

Fuck fart shit Piss

It all comes down to this

 Beautiful male Madonnas

Wrathful Maids of Honor

46
To be frank & Honest
Stink the watercloset

Shit machine piss machine

Much comes down to this
Piss machine shit machine
nomad

Nature’s not obscene

Shit piss shit piss

How’ll I end my song?
shit piss shit piss
Nature never wrong
 Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. New York: Hill and Wang,
1977. Print.
Esty, Joshua. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary
Literature, 40.1 (1999): 22-59. Web.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1980. New York: Harper &
Row, 1984. Print.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Scatological Trimmings”. The Book of Martyrdom
and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952. Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo Press, 2006. Print.
Laporte, Dominique. History of Shit. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press,
2000. Print
Lewin, Ralph A. Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and
Sociohistorical Coprology. New York: Ramdom House, 1999. Print.
Persels, Jeff and Russell Ganim. Fecal Matters in Early Modern
Literature: studies in scatology. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ;
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Print.
Plato. Parmenides. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Print.
Plato. Phaedo. Trans. by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage and Eric Salem.
Newburyport: FocusPublishing, 1998. Print.
Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua and Pantagruel. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1990. Print.
Sharkey, Rodney. “From Hardware to Software, or “Rocks, Cocks,
Creation, Defecation, and Death”: Reading Joyce and Beckett in the
Fourth Dimension”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language.
Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 2009: 28-40. Web.
Taylor, Mark C. Erring: a postmodern a/theology. Chicago: University
To Shit as Ginsberg

of Chicago Press, 1984. Print.

47
 NICK SNYDER
Nick Snyder is a recent graduate of the
comparative literature program.
When not waxing poetic about ado-
lescent Swedish vampires, he has a
deep interest in multiculturalism, glo-
48 bal ethics, and all manner of intelli-
gent-sounding things. He especially
likes the word phantasmagoric. His fu-
ture plans consist mostly of wander-
ing the globe searching for the right
Master’s research topic.

Nomad Prize for Excellence in

Undergraduate Scholarship:
Honorable Mention
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Mentor: Dr. Michael Stern

EXSANGUINATING FRIENDSHIP
ALIENTATION AND LOVE IN LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

“Be me a little.”
-Eli, Let the Right One In

A s the opening credits to Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film Let the Right
One In flash across the screen, the viewer is presented with a
simple preliminary shot: a black, featureless void punctuated only by
the languid fall of fresh snow, inching slowly out of focus. The
mesmerizing silence with which the film begins is disrupted by the voice
of a young boy who whispers menacingly “Squeal like a pig. Squeal!”
(Alfredson). The eerie calm evoked by the opening backdrop gives
way to a voice both innocent in its origin, a child, and
threateningly violent in its tone. It all seems a strange introduction
to a nuanced tale of friendship. The voice of our adolescent
speaker belongs to twelve year-old Oskar, a pale, ash-blond boy
who is the unfortunate object of incessant torment and bullying
on the part of his classmates, and his aforementioned opening
lines are a vocalized echo of their repeated taunts.
Oskar soon befriends a young girl named Eli who moves
in next door and it is not long before the action reveals her to be
an ageless vampire stuck in twelve year-old form, fated to lead a
clandestine life of isolation and exsanguination. The two learn
very quickly – Eli via her eternal, tragic nature and Oskar through
a system of unforgiving social strata and standards – that they
have commonalities not only in their close relationship to violence
but also in their marginalization from everyday society.
The film’s social landscape is characterized by a duplicity
that at once encourages self-reliance, while concurrently breeding
Let the Right One In

a suspicion of outsiders and divergences from normative

standards. The dynamic which emerges is one that is devoid of
meaningful interaction between people. The selfish
commodification of experience lays waste to the dialogical nature
of human existence which – in its most ideal form – encourages
equality and reciprocity. Violence, both in its physical and
metaphysical forms, is ignored, tolerated even, by an adult world 49
that lacks an active presence. A subtle, deliberate obfuscation of
the line between the public and private spheres permeates
Alfredson’s wintry, Cold War-era Sweden. At the redemptive
 center of the film is the pure bond between Oskar and Eli. As a
vampire, Eli functions as an alienated, symbolic representation
of a viscerally violent reliance on others for survival. Oskar, a
50
product rather than a direct source of violence, undergoes an
equally traumatic marginalization through a process of vicious
bullying. The relationship that Oskar and Eli cultivate in the film
is illustrative of both the marginalization symptomatic in their
society – a phenomenon centered around the inherent
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objectification and value judgments sewn into shallow

interpersonal interaction – and the companionship that must
contra-pose this, not only as an escape from the loneliness and
torment of a negligent world but also as a welcomed necessity for
mental and physical sustenance.
The foundation for the events within the film is Tomas
Alfredson’s portrayal of civil society in 1980s Sweden, more
specifically the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg. The film depicts
a blurring of the line between public and private life, a
phenomenon that is the primary topic of Jürgen Habermas’s The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In analyzing the
origins of the European social welfare state, Habermas states that
“the new interventionism of the nineteenth century was embraced
by a state that in virtue of the constitutionalization…of a political
public sphere tended to adopt the interest of civil society as its
own” (Habermas 142-143). This was a transformative era for civil
society and one of which Habermas is highly critical. The voice
of the state began to appropriate the voice of society, thus
diminishing the discursive power of the public sphere and
alienating the individuals within it from their own subjectivity.
Perhaps nowhere in Western Europe did this come to truer fruition
than in Scandinavia. Stuck halfway between the Iron Curtain and
the individualist West, Sweden in the 1980s represented a middle-
ground where state-intervention created a superficial simplicity
of living for its largely homogenous population. In an interview
with Karin Brandt in the Bright Lights Film Journal Alfredson
describes his choice of setting and its close resemblance to his
childhood home:
The square in the middle of the town is typical: there is
the social security office, the co-op, the library, the liquor
monopoly, and other such state-controlled institutions. It
is a calming environment, behind the Iron Curtain. You
could choose from only three kinds of toothpaste. My film
is deliberately set in 1982. (Badt, 2009)
With this in mind, one could characterize the setting as a
peaceful, uncomplicated environment, but social and civic
Let the Right One In

uniformity fostered by the state’s heavy involvement in everyday

life, as the film attests, elicits converse feelings of loneliness and
isolation. Here we see the thematic elements of the film, alienation
engendered by strict and overly simplistic social standards,
reflecting back to the opening scene: the calm and benign
simplicity of snowfall interrupted by a macabre exclamation from
a marginalized victim. 51
During the Cold War, Sweden occupied a liminal space -
in the doorway between public and private, not communist, but
not entirely liberal - a gray space in a black and white world. A
 dark, cold Scandinavian winter makes a perfect stage for Oskar
and Eli’s story. Drawing from Habermas’s theoretical perspective,
Let the Right One In presents this convergence of public and
52
private as resulting in a system of public suspicion for those who
deviate from a state-supported social norm. Alfredson posits in
his interview that “what’s interesting about bullying is the mob
psychology; the victim has something you don’t like…something
awkward that disturbs the group. When you are a kid you don’t
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want to be very special or original. You want to be part of the

group” (Badt, 2009). Put another way, one who strays from the
norm of homogeneity is perceived as a threat to the artificial sense
of group harmony. Individuality is suppressed through a system
of alienation where, within relationships, the other is
commodified, distinguished not by their potential for mutual
friendship, but by their value towards reinforcing the norm. As
evidenced by the group of defeated, alcoholic adults in the film,
friendship seems more about a pursuit of shallow self-assurance
that one fits into society rather than genuine care or interest1.
Eli’s reliance on others, however, stems from something
far deeper: her struggle for her very survival. Her physical
consumption of others for sustenance represents the hyperbolic
end of a society that marginalizes through difference and
commodifies human interaction. Where the vampiric Eli is the

1
This commodified interaction between the adults is exemplified when
we see Håkan in their local hangout for the first time. Seeing him as a
potential new member of their group, Virginia says “Kanske kan han
bjuda någonting”, which translates to “Perhaps he can offer something”,
most likely referring to a round of drinks for the group.
embodiment of alienation, Oskar is a very real product of a
negligent social order. The world of children within the film has
furthermore been abandoned by any semblance of moral authority
and it is, ironically, Oskar and Eli - the two characters cast away
by a society that strives for group harmony - who find an escape
in each other.
Coupled with a dysfunctional social dynamic it is this very
lack of authority and moral guidance which ultimately force Oskar
and Eli’s departure. In his book Being and Time Martin Heidegger
provides an explanation for this nebulous sense of authority when
he discusses the concept of the “They,” a faceless, societal figure
of authority. Heidegger portrays this concept as “not this one and
not that one, not oneself and not the sum of them all”; the They is
instead the authoritative, imaginary manifestation of an implied
social standard (Heidegger, 118-119). Additionally, Heidegger says
of this anonymous power that within its discourse “Everyone is
the other, and no one is himself” (128). In other words, everyone
becomes objectified within interpersonal experience under the
Let the Right One In

aegis of the They, and the treasured notion of the authentic self
fades.
Oskar’s lead tormenter Conny, for example, exists in this
very same world of parental neglect and oblivious educators. He
too is a victim of misguidance and blurred authority. However,
whereas Oskar wallows in his difference and lack of coherent
self, Conny’s insecurity displays itself by submitting to the tenuous 53
social standards and violently objectifying those who do not. In
Blackeberg the children are left to search aimlessly for a sense of
moral guidance, one that will help foster a successful upbringing,
 that appears to exist but is wholly intangible. Oskar and Eli’s first
meeting exemplifies this moral confusion when Eli claims they
cannot be friends simply because “That’s just the way it is.” Here,
54
Eli is acutely aware of her own marginalization and rejection from
society. She is compelled by a vague, scrutinizing hand of
authority to initially reject any kind of meaningful interaction
with Oskar. However, this initial hesitation eventually becomes
their salvation. Where Eli is ontologically different, alienated via
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her very being, Oskar is systematically shunned because of his

differences. This connection is the source of their friendship – a
true commonality within true otherness.
There is, of course, ample room for disagreement in this
assessment of Oskar and Eli’s profound companionship and none
is more glaring than that of John Calhoun in his piece “Childhood’s
End: Let the Right One In and Other Deaths of Innocence.” Calhoun
takes a decidedly different approach to the two main characters,
saying that Oskar is a boy “troubled by his own burgeoning
antisocial impulses” (Calhoun, 27). Eli, by Calhoun’s estimation,
is “a repository of adult fears about children…in touch with the
id in ways that can elicit great anxiety and discomfort” saying
finally that “insatiability for blood is almost too perfect a metaphor
for the amorphous tyrants children can be” (28). In both of these
qualifications there is a flaw. To say that Oskar has “antisocial
impulses” is to imply that his sense of alienation is somehow
self-imposed or self-originating, but how can this be when his
bullying and torment, which seem to have been going on for years,
occupy such a focal point of the film? It is clear, then, that Oskar’s
detachment from society is an involuntary marginalization, a
product rather than a cause of his objectification.
In a similar vein, Calhoun’s characterization of Eli as a
representation of a child’s potential for tyranny and
unpredictability seems to overlook the nuance and uniqueness
of this particular vampire. Eli may be feared on the grounds of
her thirst for blood or her superhuman abilities, but her being a
child has little to do with the anxiety she instills, a notion
reinforced by a group of human bullies who appear infinitely
more oppressive than our young vampire. Referring to Eli as an
insatiable tyrant evokes notions of pleasure-taking in her violent
pursuit of sustenance, but for Eli the drinking of human blood is
not a form of greedy exploitation, it is simply a necessary means
of survival.
In both instances Calhoun severely misjudges Oskar and
Eli’s nature. For Eli in particular we see evidence of a more
dynamic and emotional side, contrary to Calhoun’s more severe
characterization, early in the film. Whatever Eli’s relationship is
Let the Right One In

with the middle-aged Håkan, it is clear through his inclusion that

she has made earnest attempts at deferring the violence that is
integral to her existence. Upon killing Jocke, her first meal not
provided by Håkan, it is immediately apparent that such direct
violence causes her physical and existential pain.
This rejection of bloodshed is important also in its
indication of the care and creativity with which Alfredson treats 55
the figure of the vampire. In traditional form the vampire is often
highly sexualized and desirable, charismatic and nearly all-
powerful. Not only is Eli a pre-pubescent girl, thus non-sexual,
 she is also portrayed as highly vulnerable with her vampirism an
affliction as opposed to a gift. Håkan may exhibit a pedophilic
attraction to Eli in some instances, but Eli herself is not a
56
sexualized being.
In Oskar’s case it is a bit simpler: to imply that he is
antisocial by nature is to disregard his very real desire for
friendship and his emotional attraction to Eli. While escape is
only truly a possibility for one of them, given that Eli is essentially
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and eternally cast away from any normative society, both Oskar
and Eli yearn to flee from social frameworks centered on the
objectification and commodification of human experience, a
repressive tradition to which Karl Marx gives a thorough treatment
in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
While Marx’s thrust is predominantly aimed at alienation
as it pertains to labor, one can equally and successfully project
the theory onto basic human interaction as well. In relation to
political economy Marx insists that the worker is commodified
in the sense that he “is related to the product of his labor as to an
alien object” and “his wretchedness…is in inverse proportion to
the…magnitude of his production” (Edles, 42-43). If instead we
employ social communication as the optic-- that which is central
to Let the Right One In-- where an individual takes the place of
the laborer and another individual becomes the “alien object”
then Marx’s assertion can be interpreted both as an anticipation
of Heidegger’s “everyone is the other,” the notion of objectified
and impersonal human experience, and also as the claim that the
more thoroughly one participates in the system the more
objectified one becomes. In this regard, and with the social
dynamic of the film in mind, the conclusion drawn is that with
every attempt Oskar makes to actively assert himself subjectively,
the more alienated and commodified his existence.
As with Marx’s conception of labor, if the product of
interpersonal relationships is alienation, then interaction itself is
active alienation (Edles, 44). Heidegger as well points to a similar
idea in his discussion of distantiality, or being-with-one-another.
His contention here is that interpersonal dialogue in a society
with an authoritative “They” leads to the creation of averageness,
a space where “no one is himself” and no one is, nor would want
to be, extraordinary (Heidegger, 119). However, when viewed in
conjunction with Marx, Heidegger’s diagnosis of a society obsessed
with averageness only holds true in those which are bound to
commodified experience, places where relationships and
friendships are strictly utilitarian. In Let the Right One In it is
therefore somewhat counterintuitive that Oskar and Eli’s
companionship, a shared existence based on pure interaction,
allows for a greater sense of personal development than the
Let the Right One In

surrounding society: one which shuns reciprocity of the self--

the shared interest in mutuality and the gateway to dialogical
existence-- stubbornly guards a false sense of existential
authenticity, and appraises all interaction for the sake of personal
gain.
Through the lens of classical Greek philosophy this latter
arrangement, typified by denial, egocentrism and hollow 57
materialism, would be regarded by Aristotle as gravely defective,
purely incidental and, as it pertains to friendship, inferior to those
which pursue pleasure or mutual goodness (Pangle 39-42).
 Aristotle defined three total kinds of friendship, with the
interactions in Let the Right One In most effectively categorized
as those of utility. Friendships, acquaintances, and most other
58
kinds of relationships within the film rarely exist simply for their
own sake, but are rather a means to an end. Lacke, Virginia, Jocke,
and Gösta are companions not out of a genuine interest in one
another’s betterment, but due to a shared taste for cigarettes and
alcohol and a pitiable commonality in their own stagnant lives.
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Martin and Andreas are only friends with Conny to avoid

becoming the victims of bullying themselves and Conny’s older
brother is merely there for protection, and his own sadism, when
the object of Conny’s torment decides to defend himself. It is
within this particular dialectic of cold, utilitarian interaction that
Eli appears as a hostile specter, a threat to a rabid balance of selfish
appropriation not only in her uncanny participation in the system,
but also in her departure from it.
As a vampire, Eli utilizes others in their most literal,
corporeal forms, draining them of their blood for her sole source
of nutritional sustenance. This, however, is an abject act of
commodification of the other that goes far beyond the more
mundane variety of utility and objectification seen in Blackeberg.
John Calhoun was indeed correct in declaring the perfection of
blood-drinking as a metaphor within the film, though it is not
Eli’s supposed tyranny or insatiability that lends credence to her
violence; it is the implication that she must physically rely on
others for her own survival. Within the theoretical framework of
Habermas, Heidegger, and Alfredson’s Blackeberg, people are
preoccupied with their own ontological security, no matter if
exploitation and alienation of another is a consequence, but a
line is drawn when a selfish desire for existential reassurance
within a group turns into vampiric reliance. For a civil society
where adherence to homogenous social standards is a requirement
a dark-haired, olive-skinned vampire presents a frightening
challenge. Eli has extensive experience in interpersonal
interaction, so long as draining humans of their blood qualifies,
but her difference, and thus her power in the face of the Blackeberg
community, lies in the fact that her reliance on others has essential
value and not simply material value. In other words, Eli does not
simply leech superficially on others out of a desire for greater
ontological security; she relies on them instead as her only source
of physical sustenance.
It is, however, in Eli’s relationship with Håkan where the
viewer sees how an interaction based solely on commodified,
material value leads to her deep unhappiness and a desire for
something greater. Eli’s relationship with him is just as
commodified as any of the other relationships within the narrative
Let the Right One In

and its superficiality is defined by a lack of reciprocity. Just before

Håkan moves to maim himself beyond recognition with a jar of
acid he mutters a single word. There is a mistranslation in the
English subtitles which reads “I’m trapped,” but in reality Håkan
simply mutters Eli’s name. His devotion is confirmed as
unrequited when Eli, after feeding upon a critically-injured Håkan
in the hospital window, goes directly to Oskar’s bed where she 59
agrees to “go steady.” To Eli, Håkan was useful, but not essential.
She is more than capable of finding her own meals, a fact proven
on numerous occasions, but her discomfort with the violent act
 led her to Håkan, and while the origins of their relationship are
unclear in the film he nonetheless functions as a go-between who
shielded Eli from direct bloodshed. A child trapped in blood-
60
ridden immortality and another a hopeless victim of the
unforgiving world that raised him, Eli and Oskar find a sense of
freedom in each other. This freedom is a departure from violence,
and an outlet to the kind of emotion and happiness vital to an
Aristotelian friendship that achieves pleasure, but is primarily
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concerned with the pursuit of heartfelt care and interest in one

another.
Oskar’s existence, like Eli’s, is shrouded in the trauma of
fractured human dialogue. Where Oskar is circumstantially
shaped by violence, Eli is essentially defined by it, and it is here
where they find a chance for escape and eventually a deep
friendship and sense of shared experience. Throughout the film
Oskar is traumatized in myriad forms, both physically and
mentally. He is betrayed by a fleeting, delinquent authority,
abandoned by his parents, ceaselessly bullied, and shunned from
the social order. An absent “They” and a repetitious structure of
alienation leaves Oskar with the belief that the reciprocation of
violence is his only recourse to personal salvation, evidenced
again by the film’s opening lines. But, as Marx insinuates, the
more an objectified being participates, i.e. perpetuates, a system
of alienation, the deeper and more firm the suppression (Marx,

2
It is noteworthy also that in this moment of retaliation while on a field
trip, the teacher is distracted from Oskar and Conny’s confrontation by
the discovery of Jocke’s body frozen in the ice. This lends even deeper
support to the connection between the two characters’ violent acts.
43). Early in the film Håkan attempts to hide the body of his latest
victim using a long stick. Later, Oskar comes dangerously close
to deeper involvement in this cyclical, alienating society when
he employs the same stick in his only retaliation towards the
bully Conny. To Eli and to the film’s environment at large Håkan
was an objectified and exploited enabler of the cycle of alienation.
By attacking Conny with a symbol of Håkan’s servitude,
undoubtedly gratifying in a momentary sense, Oskar steps
precariously close to an infinite loop of subjugation2. A common
reading of the film wrestles with the paradox that despite Oskar
and Eli’s relationship, he will nonetheless age and eventually die
while she will remain. While there is legitimate concern to be
had over the implied finitude of their friendship, my focus here
lies not in the verisimilitudes of plot, but in the nature of Oskar
and Eli’s relationship and its function as a symbol of a deeply
emotional form of ontological sustenance. Despite what may occur
after the action of the film concludes the bond Oskar and Eli form
is nonetheless critical to their immediate survival in the particular
Let the Right One In

diagetic moment. It is only with Eli’s help and her own desire for
a more metaphysically rewarding existence that Oskar is able to
free himself.
In the most pointed example this sentiment is expressed
through Eli’s note to Oskar which reads, “To flee is life, to remain,
death,” a proclamation that begs Oskar to abandon the ideological
constraints of his world in a way that she cannot. Eli is immortally 61
bound to a violent life in the margins. Oskar harbors a naïve
fascination with violence, yet it is Eli’s contempt for her own
sanguine needs that leads her to implore a change in Oskar. If
 Oskar wishes to survive as a complete subject, he must flee the
shallow society which discarded him. Additionally, in response
to Eli’s assertion that they are the same, Oskar responds coldly, “I
62
don’t kill people.” Eli astutely replies, “No, but you’d like to if
you could, to get even. I do it because I have to. Be me a little.” In
her final request, to “be me a little,” Eli pleads with Oskar to not
only evaluate his own morbid interests, but also to engage in a
critical act of empathy-- to understand her tragic reliance on
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violence-- that seems to have disappeared from their world of

Marxian alienation and Heideggerian rejection of dialogical
interaction. In an exemplary scene of Oskar’s transformation, upon
seeing Eli engage in violence for the first time as she kills Lacke,
Oskar closes the door, turns away and drops his knife to the
ground. In the end the weapon that symbolized his deferred
desires for retribution goes entirely unused.
Our two young companions, once defined by a cold
rationality and detached valuation of human interaction-- Marx’s
“wretched commodities”-- find in each other a cause for an
Aristotelian friendship of mutual goodness, Oskar at once
concerned with Eli’s happiness and she with his very survival. In
the Alfredson interview, the director discusses how stories of
childhood strife usually concern sweeter, more sensitive
characters. Oskar, however, is in Alfredson’s estimation “very
unsentimental” about his experience. It is this practicality, a
symptom of an alien world, that is countered with an ultimate
hunger for true dialogue, companionship, and love. For Eli,
hopelessly ensnared in an eternal, vampiric state, Oskar represents
a chance at happiness that seemed impossible in her marginalized
existence. In stark contrast to a friendship of utility it is, as Aristotle
claims, “those who desire the good of their friends for the friends’
sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for
what he is” (Pangle, 42). In Eli’s case this relationship presents
her with a rare opportunity to do something for someone else, to
finally reciprocate some of that which she has taken from others.
An early scene in the film anticipates Oskar and Eli’s mutually-
inspired union when Eli helps Oskar to solve a Rubik’s Cube. In
previous shots Eli is positioned above Oskar within the frame, a
position of dominance, but in this scene she descends onto the
same physical plane as Oskar, a plane of equality. She hands him
the completed puzzle and this act stands in as a metaphor for her
newfound selflessness. This concept of give and take forms the
foundation of Oskar and Eli’s exploration of their new dialogical
pairing, but no analysis is complete without examining their
necessary removal of the barriers that breed objectification and
alienation.
Where Oskar and Eli’s relationship takes its most beautiful
Let the Right One In

and delicate turn is in their mutual negotiation of both the literal

and figurative walls which mediate their experience.
Metaphorically, the topic arises in Eli’s simple question, “Can I
come in?” In Alfredson’s very particular take on the vampire genre
Eli must not only request entrance to a space, but be invited in as
well. As it relates to fractured human contact this idea subverts
not only the Heideggerian claim that “Everyone is the other”, but 63
also Marxian notions of exploitation and personal gain. The
question and answer necessitate reciprocity, subjectivity, and a
mutual desire for dialogue and company in a shared space.
 Physically, mediation is expressed throughout the film in a
number of scenes. As Oskar grows suspicious of the mysterious
Eli they are at one point separated by a glass door. Oskar questions
64
her as they simultaneously graze the glass with their hands, within
sight yet barely separate, both searching for a way through to
share of themselves. It is only after the revelation of Eli’s
vampirism, the vulnerable truth which requires the giving over
of oneself, that the door opens and they can physically be together.
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This idea reappears when Eli flees after Lacke’s death and Oskar’s
ghostly image is shown in his bedroom window. He presses his
hand longingly against the glass and his handprint quickly
disappears. In this near exact mirroring of the opening scene,
without Eli, Oskar is merely a reflection without origin. They
seem to have become, in a sense, a single being through their rich
companionship.
Ingeniously, Eli and Oskar undermine the metaphorical
and physical boundaries which generate alienation and mediation
most efficiently through their reimagining of language. Using
Marxian logic one could infer that if interaction is the embodiment
of active alienation, then the words we use to interact become
the language of alienation. Thus, Oskar and Eli find a new
linguistic form in the use of Morse code. Not only are physical
barriers transformed into communicative media through tapping,
but Eli and Oskar also bypass the figurative barrier of language
by way of a private, unspoken tongue that allows their friendship
the chance for unencumbered growth. In the final scene as the
two make their escape, Eli protected from the sunlight in a box
beside Oskar, they tap the word “k-i-s-s” to each other. In this
moment, a closing testament to their bond, the viewer sees that
their companionship is at once aesthetically-striking, overflowing
with heartfelt emotion, and deeply rooted in mutuality. Far from
the wintry utilitarianism of their previous lives, their togetherness
is now the untainted pursuit of goodness and love.
To form a friendship is, to some degree, to reject a particular
instinct. It involves giving part of oneself over in vulnerability to
another and placing it in his or her care, in the good faith that his
or her intention is one of altruism. To do this requires a divergence
from the social tendency to protect one’s sense of self with an
unwavering, impenetrable feeling of authenticity and egotism.
Oskar and Eli are successful in this quest. Both characters are
children born of an innocence that is slowly corrupted by a system
of neglect and both literal and figurative violence. However, it is
this very childhood innocence and their pre-sexual state that
allows for a friendship of such purity and decency. Unlike many
incarnations of the vampire, Eli is not concerned with the
Let the Right One In

consumption of physical bodies, at least no more than is necessary

for survival, and Oskar himself is indifferent to Eli’s warning that
she is not a girl. In Let the Right One In the title hints at a distinction
between the “right” and “wrong” person to allow into one’s
existence and sense of self. In tandem, Oskar and Eli choose
correctly. They mutually create their own moral authority where
the “wrong”-- the egotistical, the utilitarian, the violent, and the 65
alienating-- is subordinated to a dialogue of equality, love, and
companionship. In the end, the dysfunctional social frameworks
which result in self-destruction and wrest away the dialogical
 nucleus of human experience are exposed as farcical, artificial
boundaries that must be razed in favor of a return to the mutual
relationships which give to humanity and vampires alike the
fullest form of existential sustenance.

Works Cited

Alfredson, Tomas, Dir. Let the Right One In. Sandrew Metronome:
2008, DVD.
Badt, Karin Luisa. “Of Bullies and Blood Drinkers: Talking to Tomas
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Alfredson about Let the Right One In.” Bright Lights Film Journal.
63 (2009). EBSCOhost. University of Oregon Lib., OR. 23 January
2011. <http://search.epnet.com/> Web.
Calhoun, John. “Childhood’s End: Let the Right One in and Other
Deaths of Innocence.” Cineaste: America’s Leading Magazine on
the Art and Politics of the Cinema 35.1 (2009): 27-31. Print.
Edles, Laura D, and Scott Appelrouth. Sociological Theory in the
Classical Era: Text and Readings. Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press,
2010. Print.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989. Print.
Heidegger, Martin, and Joan Stambaugh. Being and Time: A
Translation of Sein Und Zeit. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1996. Print.
Pangle, Lorraine S. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship.
Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003. Print.
 PATTY NASH
Patty Nash is a sophomore majoring
in comparative literature and French
with a minor in German. She is inter-
ested in absolutely everything and
would like to one day meet her musi-
cal idol, Nicki Minaj.

Mentor: Sophie Sapp

PORNOGRAPHY IN THE KITCHEN:

REE DRUMMOND’S PIONEER WOMAN, FOOD PORN,
AND THE RULES OF DOMESTICITY

F eminist thought is not at home in the kitchen. The domestic

sphere has long appeared too closely tethered to the
patriarchal notion of feminine subservience to acquire much
appreciation in feminist discourse. Indeed, domestic and feminist
spaces appear mutually exclusive: a woman who voluntarily
slaves away at a hot stove for her family has not freed herself
 from the ideology of masculine dominance and remains locked
in a system favoring male power and female subjugation.
However, I suggest that it is possible for women to find individual
68 agency well within the kitchen space, despite that room’s
decidedly antifeminist connotations of subservience. Ree
Drummond’s Confessions of a Pioneer Woman blog suggests that
cookery can become a form of currency, garnering value outside
of the strictly domestic space. Through the externalization of
domesticity in her Internet blog, the Pioneer Woman
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demonstratively exploits her sensuality through food and earns

powerful female agency. Her woman-to-woman online guide is
truly an affirmation of individual female might.
The tradition of woman-to-woman domestic “guides” is
most definitely not new. British writer and housewife Isabella
Beeton famously published her well-known Book of Household
Management in 1861. It is a gargantuan, imposing, all-
encompassing guide for young housewives. The text famously
contains an overabundance of minutely detailed instructions for
cuisine, and also addresses anything that a young housewife
would potentially come across: from the “Arrangement and
Economy of the Kitchen” to the “Rearing, Management, and
Diseases of Infancy and Childhood.” Mrs. Beeton’s Book of
Household Management is a guide that helps its readers establish
authority within the domestic sphere. It does not, however, advise
its readers as to how they might garner agency outside of this
realm, suggesting that women are authoritative in the home, but
men are authorities everywhere else.
Conventional thought does not associate feminism with
the kitchen. In the article “Power and Ideology in the ‘Women’s
Sphere’” writer Judith Lowder Newton suggests that “the ideology
of women’s sphere…served the interests of industrial capitalism
by insuring the continuing domination of middle-class women
by middle-class men” (Lowder Newton 891). However, I propose
that women in the domestic sphere are truly able to produce
valuable commodities exchangeable, consumable, and worthy
outside of this realm. Indeed, the Pioneer Woman is successful at
establishing worth outside of her small domestic realm through
the publication of her blog, which is available to everyone with
Internet access.
In sociological theory, this worth is deemed “capital,” and
is usually divided into three categories: economic, social, and
cultural. These categories are vitally important tools in
“understanding social and economic processes, social interaction,
and social mobility” (Hakim 499). In the article “Erotic Capital,”
sociologist Catherine Hakim proposes a fourth category
fundamentally important in social communication, called “erotic
capital.” Exchange of this capital is pertinent among women, who
Pornography in the Kitchen

according to Hakim “appear to have greater erotic capital than

men” if only for their “fertility” (499).
Hakim defines erotic capital as sexual desirability to be
exploited for symbolic exchange and valuation in social space.
She asserts that erotic capital is not merely a “major asset in mating
and marriage markets but can also be important in labor markets,
the media, the arts… and in everyday social interaction” (499). 69
Erotic capital contains seven elements surprisingly not all limited
to superficial attractiveness. The third element of erotic capital,
for example, is “definitely social: grace, charm, social skills in
 interaction, the ability to make people like you” (500) and
“includes skills that can be learnt and developed” (501), creating
a “combination of aesthetic, visual, social and sexual
70
attractiveness to other members of your society… in all social
contexts” (501). Erotic capital is more than just sexiness: it is a
viable social asset.
It is clear that Isabella Beeton does little to perform sexual
desirability. She acquires almost no erotic capital through her
writing and, thus, remains a virtually powerless female figure.
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Ree Drummond, on the other hand, succeeds in attaining erotic

capital through the performance of her sensual cookery. She
effectively re-inscribes herself as an active, powerful female
working within a sphere traditionally associated with
subservience and negotiates a place for herself situated between
traditionally opposite domestic and feminist realms. Through
externalization and publication of her private duties on the blog,
Drummond is able to cash in on her erotic capital – exchanging
her value not only in the kitchen, but in the blog’s forum as well.
Her erotic capital – achieved through the overall presentation of
her food – is earned by sharing her assets with the millions
worldwide who read and respond to the blog.
Oklahoma housewife Ree Drummond created Confessions
of a Pioneer Woman in May 2006, initially as an attempt to staying
in contact with out-of-town friends and family. Fast forward five
years and the Pioneer Woman has developed into a veritable
blogging behemoth – garnering upwards of 13 million hits per
month. Despite beginnings as a lifestyle blog, Confessions of a
Pioneer Woman is primarily a blog about food. Critics celebrate
Drummond’s blog for the beautifully executed step-by-step
pictorial recipes punctuated with trademark tongue-in-cheek
humor. The succulent imagery on the Pioneer Woman Cooks
section of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman carries the blog’s
success: each of the 28 pictures in the entry describing how to
recreate “Pioneer Woman’s Knock You Naked Brownies,” for
example, is bright, clear, and utterly mouthwatering.
Drummond’s blog is only another (albeit wildly successful)
installation in the spread of food blogs who title their stylish
imagery “food porn.” This phenomenon is marked by elaborately
devised photography, delectable food creations, and, most
importantly, millions of ogling “readers” who consume food porn
more readily than food itself. Judging by the Web’s excess of
voracious food porn-consumers-and-pornographers, it is clear that
such culinary imagery is becoming as widely devoured as sexual
pornography. Cher Holt-Fortin goes so far as to remark that “the
consumption of a food culture… seems to be displacing sex and
the consumption of sexuality. As we avidly discussed our sexual
Pornography in the Kitchen

exploits and liberation during the sixties, so we now avidly discuss

the meals we’ve cooked and the restaurants we’ve eaten in”(Holt-
Fortin).
Suggesting “pornography” in the domestic sphere would
appear problematic in a blog with as mainstream a following as
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. Drummond readily resolves
this issue by using her blog’s food pornography to bank the 71
aforementioned erotic capital, thereby securing herself before her
audience. This capital definitively establishes her individual
worth and complicates preconceptions of the dichotomy between
 chaste domesticity and blatant sensuality. Through the
performative use of food pornography within the (G-rated)
domestic sphere, and by publicizing her culinary adventures to
72
the voyeuristic millions who read her blog, Drummond
accumulates female agency for herself, despite the seemingly
limited domestic setting. Indeed, by deploying this domesticity
onto an audience of over 2 million readers per month, Drummond
attains her value as an entrepreneur, writer, chef, and success
story.
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What, even, is “food porn?” The term is highly evocative.

Food writer Molly O’Neill describes it as a culinary phenomenon
“so removed from real life that it cannot be used except as
vicarious experience.” Indeed, the food in “food porn” is not
physical nourishment, but rather an “aesthetic-experience” so far
removed from reality that it offers little in the way of actual
nutritional value. Similarly, Richard Magee speculates that food,
when “removed from the kitchen, becomes divorced from its
nutritive or taste qualities and enters a realm where surface
appearance is all-important… the interest here is in creating a
graphic simulation of a real food that is beyond anything that the
home cook could produce.” In “food porn,” the aesthetic trumps
the physical and satiates an entirely different hunger for
consumption.
“Food porn” really is a fantasy: its images are so perfectly
stylized and its digital photos so meticulously edited that part of
what comes with its consumption is the knowledge that the home
cook will never feasibly be able to recreate the dish. The magical
world of food pornography has “as little to do with the real
pleasures of eating as the other pornography has to do with the
real pleasures of sex” (Magee). In the fantasy world of both
symbolic and physical consumption, food porn reinforces the
importance of what we (would like to) consume and what we
(would like to) be.
Roland Barthes highlights food’s symbolic potency in his
collection of essays, Mythologies. In the essay “Ornamental
Cookery,” regarding the food pages of Elle magazine, Barthes pays
careful attention to the section’s extravagant imagery, stating that
“there is an obvious endeavor to glaze surfaces, to round them
off, to bury the food under the even sediment of sauces” (78).
Indeed, this “ornamental cookery” is the food porn of the 1950’s.
Elle’s section consists of cookery with “unbridled beautification”
where gustatory reality is of little concern: it is a “cookery …
based on coatings and alibis for ever trying to extenuate and even
to disguise the primary nature of foodstuffs” (Barthes 78). Food
porn is pure fancy. Approaching reality through these images is
as absurd an idea as eating the image itself. Instead, the fantasy
Pornography in the Kitchen

tells us more of its context than of its content, alluding to human

desires and hungers left unfed.
The term “food porn” is so polemically evocative because
of its sexual connotations. The term could not exist without its
taboo counterpart, “real,” or sexual pornography. Both food and
sexual pornography are fantasies available for eager consumption
by the greedy masses. However, this perceived voyeurism is false: 73
pornography is always an intentional performance, and gazing
upon it is neither unexpected nor accidental. Pornography exists
to be watched. In the book Porn Studies, Linda Williams
 emphasizes the value of the performative, stating that “the
performed acts construct the ‘it’ that they purport to reveal” (6).
Richard Magee again states it best in saying that “both food
74
pornography and sexual pornography are primarily focused on
food or sex as performance, and like all performances, are
designed as a voyeuristic exercise.”
The Pioneer Woman Cooks, then, is pornographic. The
blog’s chief claim to fame is the beautiful, step-by-step pictorials
of each dish’s preparation, which are pure performance: the home
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cook, especially the domestic one presumably already busy with

childcare and home duties, does not normally photograph the
process of cracking eggs or mincing garlic. Drummond
furthermore makes sure that the photographs are edited, styled
and composed perfectly, even apologizing for the occasional
aesthetic misstep, such as in the entry for “Make ahead Muffin
Melts,” wherein she comments on her second photo by stating,
“Sorry about the excessive bokeh1. It happens sometimes.” Her
meticulous food photography is “manicured just as photos in
‘girlie’ magazines are and have little to do with reality” (Holt-
Fortin). Food pornography depends on its surface appearance, if
simply because that is all that is available.
Additionally, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman is
pornographic in its vocabulary, which is patently, sensually
expressive. For example, Pioneer Woman’s chocolate sheet cake
“causes moans and groans in anyone who takes a bite” (“The
Best Chocolate Sheet Cake. Ever”), her pasta with red pepper sauce
1
A photographic function in which the foreground is clear while the
background is blurry.
“renders me speechless” (“Pasta with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce”),
and “you’ll want to lick up every last drop” of Drummond’s “Filet
au Poivre.” Drummond emphasizes gustatory delight in her fare
– it’s all food that “makes her skirt fly up” (she uses this particular
phrase quite often). Moreover, a typical finale to a recipe is a
picture of the food Drummond has just prepared, concluding with
a dynamic, monosyllabic expression: “Yikes,” “Yum,” or “Ahh.”
This language indicates that the Pioneer Woman’s cuisine
is ultimately meant to be consumed. Indeed, the “pure sensual
enjoyment of the food stands at the apex of [the] hierarchy” in
the Pioneer Woman’s blog (Magee). This striking emphasis on
consumption is erotically evocative, as the ecstasy of the senses
is valued above all else. While the blog’s imagery is far too dazzling
to seem approachable, through expressive writing, Drummond
encourages readers to mimic her construction of “food porn.”
While food pornography often seems staunchly inapproachable
in its perfection, Drummond stresses her recipes’ accessibility
and even their lusciousness. The recipes in Barthes’ “Ornamental
Pornography in the Kitchen

Cookery” are marked with ingredients so fanciful that “the real

problem is not to have the idea of sticking cherries into a partridge,
it is to have the partridge, that is to say, to pay for it” (79). The
Pioneer Woman, on the other hand, has received criticism for
requesting Kraft pre-sliced mozzarella in her lasagna recipe. Her
food is packed with ingredients that may even appear vulgar in
their mass accessibility, therefore, both immediately available and 75
sensuous.
This savor-ability of The Pioneer Woman’s cuisine presents
a complication in traditional notions of food pornography.
 Pornography has no stronghold in reality – instead it recalls

distance and fantasy and is meant for only visual consumption.

The Pioneer Woman Cooks, on the other hand, is all about

76
proximity: eat this now; it seems to say to its readers. The blog is,

thereby, doubly pornographic. In its imagery, the blog is

inapproachable, a fanciful culinary fantasy, “food pornography”

at its finest. And yet the recipes exist for gustatory pleasure and

gluttonous, decadent consumption. This construction ultimately

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establishes the Pioneer Woman as one with erotic desirability

and agency. Drummond’s appetite seems to “operate as a

metaphor for sexual appetite” (Magee). Recipes are fueled by the

Pioneer Woman’s own ravenous desire for taste that appears like

a rapacious desire for sensuality.

This sexualization is somewhat problematic, given the

blog’s otherwise wholesome domestic content: Drummond is a

stay-at-home mother with four children (homeschooled by none

other than Drummond herself). She lives on a ranch and has

affectionately dubbed her rugged, cowboy husband “Marlboro

Man.” Besides cooking, Drummond’s blog contains sections with

titles like “Home & Garden,” “Photography,” “Confessions” and

“Homeschooling.” Drummond’s second book, From High Heels

to Tractor Wheels, is the autobiographical story of how

Drummond, a recent USC graduate headed to law school, met

her cowboy husband and decided to “settle down” as a stay-at-

home wife and mother. At first, the blog appears a retrograde

how-to guide for female pacification. Drummond performs as the

queen of a gorgeous household and the blog seems an extended

how-to guide for housewives around the world.

Just as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was

an authoritative, comprehensive source of household information

for young housewives in 1861, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman

would appear to be the domestic Bible of the new Millennium.

Drummond’s primary topics – cooking, home/garden design, and

homeschooling – are unquestionably domestic, all occurring

within the home. Even her other topics seem like appropriately

trifling hobbies for a housewife otherwise in control of her realm.

However, while Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and Mrs.

Beeton’s Book of Household Management overlap content-wise,

Confessions of a Pioneer Woman presents a departure from the

domestic tradition that Beeton’s book suggests.

Mrs. Beeton is a dense, involved colossus. Few pictures

accompany the text and those that do exist for strictly Pornography in the Kitchen

informational purposes. Furthermore, Beeton’s text is almost

distant in its account. Indeed, Beeton performs her domesticity

rather austerely and does little to promote female agency in the

outside realm. Despite the fact that Beeton has released her writing

into a reading public, she does not successfully achieve agency

(or, it would seem, even attempt to do so) outside of the domestic

sphere.
77
While Mrs. Beeton’s is impersonal and technical,

Drummond’s blog, on the other hand, showcases her vibrant

personality. as each entry is highly entertaining and humorous.

 All of the Pioneer Woman’s entries are marked by both

lighthearted banter and brilliant photography. Her cooking entries

are not only colorfully illustrated, but are also flippantly self-
78
deprecating, poking fun at her fingers’ “alien-like” appearance

and at her own lack of self-control around food. The “Confessions”

section of her blog contains remarks like quote “I went about the

task of cleaning out the workout room in our house, which over

the past year had become overrun with such treasures as empty
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cattle vaccine bottles, a Stairmaster strewn with Carharrt coats,

eighty thousand gloves with no mates, outgrown boots, worn out

boots, and a chicken bone” end quote (“The One that got Away”).

Drummond’s writing is on the whole far more dynamic than

Beeton’s.

Drummond’s recipes are most definitely not offensively

or tastelessly sexual in the traditional sense. Still, sexuality and

female agency are patently visible in the Pioneer Woman’s blog.

She simply achieves it through subversive means. The

deployment of “food pornography” online ultimately endows the

Pioneer Woman with personal agency attained through symbolic

erotic exchange and capital. By acquiring erotic capital and value

through the presentation of the food and her unique performance

of domesticity, Drummond negotiates a unique, and powerful

female identity.

Ultimately, the eroticized food pornography on

Drummond’s blog is tantamount in creating her erotic capital.

Her readers consume the blog’s content voraciously. Drummond,

as the blog’s very successful producer, is seated in a position of
power and thus chooses how to perform to her audience. By
making her blog so publically available, she is able to bridge the
gap between female sexuality and domesticity and in doing so
she refuses to be categorized by any other means than those that
she has determined. The erotic capital she acquires through the
patent sensuality performed to millions in The Pioneer Woman
Cooks seems to be the transition between the spheres of
domesticity and feminism. In accumulating authority through a
domestic lens, the Pioneer Woman challenges conventional
definitions of such concepts and suggests an alternative femininity,
powerful both in the kitchen and in the outside world.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Print.
Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. New
York: Exeter, 1986. Print.
Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. New York:
Pornography in the Kitchen

Penguin, 2004. Print.

Drummond, Ree. “The Pioneer Woman Cooks | Ree Drummond.”
The Pioneer Woman | Ree Drummond. 31 Jan. 2011. <http://
thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/>. Web.
Hakim, Catherine. “Erotic Capital.” European Sociological Review
26.5 (March 2010): 499-518. Web.
Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism
and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (May
2003): 179-202. Print.
Holt-Fortin, Cher. “A Load of Bread, A Jug of Wine, and Thou Beside
Me in the Kitchen.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular
Culture 1.2 (2002). Http://www.americanpopularculture.com. 13 79
Jan. 2011. Web.
Magee, Richard M. “Food Puritanism and Food Pornography: the
Gourmet Semiotics of Martha and Nigella.” Americana 6.2 (Fall
2007). Print.
 McBride, Anne E. “Food Porn.” Gastronomica (Winter 2010): 38-46.
Print.
Newton, Judith L. “Power and Ideology of ‘Women’s Sphere’”
Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. By
Robyn Warhol-Down and Herndl Diane Price. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers UP, 1991. 880-95. Print.
O’Neill, Molly. “Food Porn.” Columbia Journalism Review 42.2
(2003). Print.
Williams, Linda. “Introduction.” Introduction. Porn Studies.
Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print.
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 JACOB PLAGMANN
Jacob Plagmann is a sophomore
studying comparative literature, Rus-
sian and German. Outside of and
within these focuses he also engages
with topics regarding philosophy, his-
tory and religion.

Mentor: Chet Lisiecki

DYNAMIC SELF-BECOMING
AND THE PERCEPTION OF CHRISTIAN SIN IN DOSTOEVSKY’S
THE BROTHERS KARAMOZOV AND THE WORKS OF SøREN
KIERKEGAARD

T he theme of dynamic self-becoming, that one is

perpetually striving to establish a self, lies at the fore of
Søren Kierkegaard’s work. Self-becoming, as opposed to the
rejection of the existence of human free will in determinism,
hinges on the notion of “movement,” that the self is constantly in
flux. Within his pseudonymously composed texts The Concept
 of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard elaborates
the theme of dynamic self-becoming and its application to
individual religious development. Namely, Kierkegaard’s
82
pseudonyms examine, within the context of Christian theology,
the universality of sin. Sin, in both of these texts, embodies the
fundamental opposition to self-becoming, a process whereby an
individual discovers his relation to the divine through cultivating
active self-knowledge. That an individual is in sin, rather than in
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faith, implies that the individual maintains or cultivates what

Kierkegaard calls a “misrelation to God,” that is, a passive and
static state of being, or non-becoming. Both pseudonyms articulate
the symptoms of this ‘sickness’: anxiety, for the pseudonym Vigilus
Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety, and despair, for Anti-
Climacus in The Sickness Unto Death.
These two expressions of sin, anxiety and despair also
manifest themselves within the narrative of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan and Dmitri, the eldest sons of
Fyodor Pavlovich, encounter and react to these symptoms
dynamically within an emerging dialectic of sin, in which, in
order to become a self, one must destroy complacency and
position oneself in relation to God, the divine absolute. But it
cannot be assumed that either brother will then ultimately live in
faith. Dostoevsky ends his exposition of the characters with
Kierkegaard’s notion of a ‘pathos-filled transition,’ or an
impassioned leap from possibility to actuality. These dramatic
events ultimately showcase actual movement and development
of the self under the template of the dialectic of sin. Dostoevsky
communicates through his characters that, within the dialectic
of sin, guilt exists as the crux around which all movement takes
place. The sin-consciousness of an individual existing within this
dialectic relies on his own authenticity in sustaining his will
against self-deception, so that his self may come to recurrently
face this guilt as an existential necessity related to becoming.
Integral to Kierkegaard’s methodology of sin is his
utilization of psychology. Haufniensis approaches sin
psychologically through anxiety, and Anti-Climacus through
despair. As psychological forces, anxiety and despair expose the
universality of sin in humanity. Haufniensis comments: “How
sin came into the world, each man understands solely by himself.
If he would learn it from another, he would eo ipso misunderstand
it. The only science that can help a little is psychology” (COA
51). That one is in sin cannot be taught by another; this awareness
of sin can only follow from one’s experience. Through worldly
experience, anxiety and despair indicate the individual’s
The Brothers Karamazov

sinfulness to the individual. Kierkegaard’s psychological

methodology intends to aid the intellect in realizing that a genuine
understanding of sin cannot be achieved through logical thought
and reflection alone. Sin must be understood passionately; in
anxiety and despair the humiliation of omnipresent sinfulness
stands as an impassable barrier to self-development.
That sin can come to be recognized, Kierkegaard holds, is 83
evidence of the individual’s divine aspect: the spirit. Both
Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus define the individual in roughly
the same manner: “man is a synthesis of the psychical and the
 physical… united in a third. This third is spirit” (COA 43, SUD
13). Thus an individual is a combination of psyche and body.
The fusion of these earthly components results in the birth of the
84
individual’s spirit, synonymous with the individual’s ‘self’. The
spirit becomes indicative of the individual’s relation to God and
the divine (SUD 13-14). The well being of the individual spirit
then becomes expressive of the well being of the individual’s
relation to God.
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Thus a negative relation to the self, characterized by an

attempt to repress the self, amounts to a misrelation with God.
When an individual maintains or cultivates a misrelation to God,
the individual is in sin. Anti-Climacus establishes sin as “not a
negation but a position… before God” (SUD 96-100) and, in
quoting Romans, maintains that “whatever does not proceed from
faith is sin” (SUD 105). This basic description reveals a sin/faith
dichotomy, within which an individual is either in the position
of sin before God, or in the position of faith. Each individual
possesses the capacity to express each. This capacity is illustrated
by a dialectic of sin, within which the individual spirit perpetually
oscillates between faith and sin in the divine relation.
Kierkegaard’s dialectic of sin is strictly non-Hegelian.
Kierkegaard rejects Hegel’s dialectic, which he understands as an
historical and deterministic dialectic with the capacity to logically
mediate and reconcile all oppositions. Kierkegaard argues instead
that essential contradictions, inherent especially within
Christianity, are the basis for the individual’s capacity for dynamic
movement between opposites (Carlisle 30-45), and the only mode
by which an individual could become a self, the most crucial of
human endeavors. Through self-becoming an individual asserts
his significance to the world.
The essential opposites within the dialectic, faith and sin,
appear mutually exclusive before the individual spirit, and to
choose to become one or the other stands as a recurring existential
necessity requiring spiritual exertion. Anti-Climacus notes that
the dialectic, in its abstractness, stands as a paradox but
emphasizes strength of spirit in the individual:
There is nothing meritorious about being in despair to a
higher degree. Esthetically it is an advantage, for
esthetically there is concern only for vigor; but ethically
the more intensive form of despair is further from salvation
than the lesser form… there is no merit in being a sinner…
but on the other hand, how in the world can an essential
sin-consciousness be found in a life that is so immersed
in triviality… a life that is too spiritless to be called sin”
(101).
The Brothers Karamazov

In the mode of religious feeling, the ethical realm comes

to clash with esthetic passion. It is both reprehensible and a saving
grace to remain deep in sin. Such a person is doomed to wallow
in depravity and damnation, but to have the capacity to remain
deeply in despair implies great spiritual strength. Thus the
possibility of salvation, should it ever become realized in actuality,
would become all the more glorious. 85
The possibilities within the sin/faith dichotomy are
informed by the dialectic of sin, but Kierkegaard holds that if any
change is to become actualized, the individual must undergo a
 ‘pathos-filled transition.’ “If a dialectical transition leads from
one possibility to another, a pathos-filled transition is a leap from
possibility to actuality… dialectical transitions… [do not] change
86
anything in actuality” (Eriksen 123). The capacity for movement
in an individual consciousness is highlighted in the dialectal
relation of opposites. But for change to occur concretely in a
movement of actualized possibility, an impassioned and dynamic
‘leap’ must occur within the spirit of the individual. This
movement is qualified by the sin/faith dichotomy and explains
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how great sin can lead to great faith: “Sin has a salvational
dimension… because sinning brings one so close to spiritual death
that the only way out is a radical turn in a different direction”
(Blank 11). This ‘radical turn’ represents the impassioned
dynamics involved in the individual’s frantic transcendence of
obscurity through becoming.
Concretely, in the context of the spirit of the individual,
the relationship between sin and faith is ambivalent and complex.
In order to gain a clearer perception of sin without abstracting it
into triviality, Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms examine the notable
relationship between the abstract modes of anxiety and despair
and their embodied manifestation in sin. Unacknowledged or
intentional sinfulness disrupts the individual’s synthesis (physical
and psychical joining to elevate the spirit) and impedes the
development of the spirit. In psychology these expressions of sin
are denoted respectively as anxiety and despair.
Anxiety affects the individual earliest in the progression
of the spirit. The individual is born into the world seemingly
innocent and completely ignorant of his eternal aspect, the spirit.
“In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit… The spirit in man
is dreaming” (COA 41). Anxiety’s ominous form soon becomes
discernable. A psychological phenomenon, anxiety acts as an
emissary of the spirit, which wants to be acknowledged and
posited. Anxiety subtly seduces the individual with the possibility
of freedom and potential self-determination, what Kierkegaard
calls “the possibility of possibility” (COA 42). The individual
attempts to assert and actualize this freedom, but he is initially
unsuccessful. The resultant failure and humiliation forces the
individual to become painfully aware of his ignorance and
sinfulness. “Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which
emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis,” which is,
as Haufniensis says, “the physical and the psychical united in
spirit” (61).
Anxiety surfaces in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
within the first son of Fyodor Pavlovich, Dmitri Karamazov.
Dmitri’s relations with his father are particularly scandalous and
heated. His violent and passionate feud with this sensuous
The Brothers Karamazov

‘buffoon’ revolves around the morally ambiguous Grushenka,

who, by their own description, is sure to announce her decision
to become betrothed to one of them very soon.
In his three-part ‘Confession of an Ardent Heart’ Dmitri
intimates to his brother, Alyosha, his personal struggle: “Have
you ever felt, have you ever dreamt of falling down a precipice
into a pit? That’s just how I’m falling, but not in a dream” (93). 87
This description of his trajectory, as though he were plunging
into an abyss, is expressive of Dmitri’s defeated spirit, left mortified
by ruthless anxiety. Additionally, Haufniensis’ description of
 anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ bears considerable likeness
to the motion of falling. Indeed, Dmitri remarks that he is ‘falling’
but is ‘not in a dream.’ This corresponds with Haufniensis’ notion
88
of the ‘dreaming, or unborn, spirit,’ the state of the individual
ignorant of his divine aspect. Dmitri continues: “I go on and I
don’t know whether I’m going to shame or to light and joy. That’s
the trouble, for everything in the world is a riddle!” (96) In Dmitri’s
state of ambivalence and confusion, his dormant spirit is suddenly
shaken awake and immediately blinded by the radiance of the
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new and imminent possibility of religious experience. And yet

he feels compelled to continue fumbling forward, embarrassed
by his nakedness, hitherto helpless within the miserable throes
of anxiety.
In The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus takes up the
topic of sin with relation to the development of self once again,
but at a different point in the progression of the spirit. The
psychological force in this case is notably different: despair.
Despair is a “sickness of the self,” described by Anti-Climacus as
“an impotent self-consuming” (18). It can be described as the
unwillingness to posit the entire relation, as an individual human
being, and an attempt to abort the self and to prevent the spirit
from thriving. Anti-Climacus calls this willed evasiveness “in
despair not to will to be oneself” (49).
But Anti-Climacus asserts that for the human being, there
exists another dimension to the self, and because the individual
is not established by itself, but by God, there is the potential for a
deeper form of despair. “The human self is such a derived,
established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in
relating itself to itself relates itself to another” (13-14). Therefore
an individual could attempt to become a relation that would gladly
and without question relate itself to itself in order to posit spirit.
But, according to Anti-Climacus, “the misrelation of [this form
of] despair is… a misrelation in a relation that relates itself to
itself and has been established by another” (14). Because this
individual did not establish itself and is not the source of any
aspects of the synthesis, this self, in relating itself to itself, must
in turn relate itself back to that which established the entire
relation. Thus the individual that is in despair attempts to impede
the exaltation of that which represents the eternal and divine in
oneself: the spirit, or self. In both cases, the individual in despair
is in sin, for to be in despair amounts to a revolt against God. This
form, characterized as “in despair to will to be oneself,” is a more
advanced and intense form of despair and is for this reason more
sinful.
It is this form of despair that is suffered by the second son
The Brothers Karamazov

of the iniquitous Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan Karamazov. Ivan’s

despair becomes apparent through his conversation with Alyosha.
Ivan relates stories of recent cases of human atrocities,
concentrating specifically on atrocities committed against
children. Ivan finds it outrageous and unwarranted that innocent
children should be subjected to the obscene and unthinkable acts
of cruelty possible (and as Ivan indicates, sometimes fulfilled) on 89
earth and within the societies of men: “The innocents must not
suffer for another’s sins, and especially such innocents!” (219)
He asserts that “[adults] have retribution—they’ve eaten the apple
 and know good and evil… but the children haven’t eaten anything

and are so far innocent” (218-219). Ivan cannot accept a world in

which such rampant and unjustifiable depravity is allowed against
90
innocent children, those without the knowledge of good and evil.
Thus Ivan rejects God’s creation, the ultimate expression of God’s
will, and in a literal revolt against God, attempts to pit himself
and his sense of justice against divine will. This despairing
insubordination stifles his relationship to God and is sinful.
Thus, anxiety and despair are useful in that they act as
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psychological indicators of sin. In a dialectical sense, in pointing

to the possibility of sin in an individual, they can in turn
demonstrate the possibility of faith in an individual. The infinite
possibility contained in the dialectic is echoed once again in
Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Haufniensis remarks: “The greatness
of anxiety is a prophecy of the greatness of perfection” (64). Anti-
Climacus says of despair: “Consequently, to be able to despair is
an infinite advantage and yet to be in despair is not only the worst
misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination… despair is like a
descent when compared with being able to be; the descent is as
infinitely low as the excellence of possibility is high” (15).
Kierkegaard maintains that the great suffering induced by anxiety
and despair in fact speak to the fortitude of the individual’s spirit,
and rather than abolish the individual’s God relation, these forces
generate tension within this relation, allowing for a semblance of
severance or recoil. Thus, the vehemence of Dmitri and Ivan’s
sinfulness, made evident by their psychological symptoms of
anxiety and despair respectively, highlights their possibility for
decisive and pivotal becoming within the Christian dialectic of
repentance.
 Within Dostoevsky’s novels, and certainly within The
Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky brings together characters with
conflicting ideals and forces them to interact. His ambiguous and
seemingly impartial treatment of these views has prompted
multiple interpretations of his worldview (Blank 3-6). Mikhail
Bakhtin asserts that this disagreement is prompted by an inherent
deviation from the typical European style novel, in which the
tension between characters culminates in the representation of
an authorial monologue or unified message. Bakhtin holds that
the epitome of this style is reached in the Byronic hero, in that
the ideals of the Byronic hero represent those of the author in
what Bakhtin calls a “monologic all-encompassing consciousness”
(Bakhtin 7). Conversely, the voices of Dostoevsky’s characters
collectively supercede the voice of the author so that it remains
completely indiscernible: “Not only does the novel give no firm
support outside the rupture-prone world of dialogue for a third,
monologically all-encompassing consciousness—but on the
contrary, everything in the novel is structured to make dialogic
opposition unresolvable” (Bakhtin 18). This irreconcilability of
The Brothers Karamazov

worldviews is essential to Dostoevsky’s work and, as Ksana Blank

maintains, lies at the foundation of his understanding of
Christianity.
In Dostoevsky’s philosophy and theology, various
opposites are outwardly mutually exclusive, but inwardly they
are indivisible and inseparable—and therefore they must be
approached synchronically. In his universe, opposites form a 91
single unity that cannot exist or be cognized without each other.
The pros and contras involved in this eternal dialogue form a
single, antinomic whole. For Dostoevsky, grasping the two aspects
 of this single whole simultaneously was an inherently Christian
endeavor… one must be able to recognize… inseparability and
interdependence vis-a vis a dynamic, constantly changing
92
temporal background (7).
In Dostoevsky’s view, Christianity teaches that
contradictory views are actually only single aspects of a larger
‘eternal dialogue’ within which ideas and individuals are never
at rest and exist dynamically. Distilled to its quintessence, these
dynamics appear as an oscillation within a sin/faith dichotomy.
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Blank illustrates Dostoevsky’s dynamic conception as a ‘dialectic

of sin.’ Different from Hegelian dialectics, Blank explains that
“here opposites do not emerge as stages; they do not cancel each
other out in a synthesis. Each part contains a kernel of its opposite
that can potentially lead to radical change. The antithesis is thus
born from inside the thesis” (16). In this dialectic, as in
Kierkegaard’s, the possibility of sin, as well as the possibility of
faith lies within every individual.
Though each character in The Brothers Karamazov would
appear to represent a single point of view, Blank maintains that
Dostoevsky illustrates their capacity to become altered through
moments of ‘non-coincidence’: “In The Brothers Karamazov,
almost every character has moments of ‘non-coincidence’…Ivan
is always consistent in his reasoning… yet… his rational abilities
fail him and he yields to hallucination in the form of a
conversation with the devil” (57). As for Dmitri, following his
father’s murder, everyone in town is convinced of his guilt, for
Dmitri had publicly wished for his father’s death, and had even
broken into his house and violently assaulted him. But Dmitri
maintains his innocence, claiming that his “devil was conquered”
(446). These ‘moments of non-coincidence’ highlight the
possibility of movement within an individual consciousness.
The village people view Dmitri’s infamous licentiousness
as, with the exception of his father, unrivaled. Like his father,
Dmitri’s reputation as a sensualist precedes him. He woefully
proclaims: “’To insects—sensual lust’… I am that insect brother…
and all we Karamazovs are such insects…[for us] sensual lust is a
tempest—worse than a tempest’ ” (96-97). Haufniensis holds that
the predomination of this sensuality is an apparent indicator of
Dmitri’s sinfulness. “By sin, sensuousness became sinfulness”
(COA 63). Sensuality plagues the individual as a remnant of
original sin. Haufniensis explains: “Sinfulness is by no means
sensuousness, but without sin there is no sexuality, and without
sexuality, no history. A perfect spirit has neither the one nor the
other” (49). By original sin, humanity’s mortality is realized, and
every individual subsequent to Adam comes to exist naturally
and sexualized in sin.
Ivan’s sin has its origins in his rejection of God’s creation
and his derisive turn away from immortality: “If the sufferings of
The Brothers Karamazov

children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to

pay for truth, then I protest that truth is not worth the price… It’s
not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully
return Him the ticket [for eternal life]” (226). “That’s rebellion,”
Alyosha responds. Ivan’s revolt against God is complete with his
declaration that, if such injustice is allowed to occur, then
“everything is lawful” (244). His offense exposes the depth of his 93
despair as “before God, or with the conception of God… in despair
to will to be oneself. Thus… intensified defiance” (SUD 78). Anti-
Climacus would understand Ivan’s vehement defiance as an
 unfathomable rift between Ivan and God made vast by despair.
“In order that the ‘No,’ which in a way wants to grapple with
God, can be heard, a person must get as far away from God as
94
possible. The most offensive forwardness toward God is at the
greatest distance” (114). Ivan’s rebellion is indicative of his intense
despair. Its uninterrupted continuity results in the proliferation
of his profound sinfulness.
Psychically, Dmitri and Ivan are harried by anxiety and
despair, and it can be said that neither attempts to evade these
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forces or strives for self-deception. These characters rush into

battle; the suffering that leads to truth causes unrivaled anguish.
Yet this torment inspires within them the greatest form of human
passion as they clash with sin. Each brother advances toward the
precipice and in passionate defiance of non-being, leaps into the
abyss to engage in the relentless struggle. The outcome is
unknown, but no individual can come away from this
confrontation unscathed. Dmitri dreams of a peasant village burnt
to the ground in the midst of the frigid Siberian winter. The
peasants are made to stand along the dirt road, and Dmitri is struck
with the image of a baby, its cloth soaked through, freezing from
the cold and starving in poverty. Dmitri cries: “But why is it
weeping… why are its little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it
up… why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the
steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why
don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black
misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?” (479) Ivan is taunted by
the devil himself, for he cannot uphold his mutinous precept
‘everything is lawful.’ “’Conscience! What is conscience? I make
it up for myself. Why am I tormented by it? From habit. From the
universal habit of mankind for seven thousand years. So let us
give it up, and we shall be gods.’ It was he [the devil] who said
that, it was he who said that!” (620) Ivan and Dmitri cannot force
themselves into contentment with their current mode of
sinfulness. Great guilt instills itself and compels within them an
anxious desire for change. We witness before our eyes
Kierkegaard’s ‘pathos-filled transitions’ arising from out of their
debased and corrupted hollows. Their souls turned over, their
only option is that of becoming.
Dmitri and Ivan, deep in sin, have thus far sought to
exercise their freedom as individuals. Their sinfulness led to their
dissolute foundering, but in the process both have come to
recognize something else: guilt. Kierkegaard explains that this
phenomenon is indeed related to their supposed free will: “Hence
anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit
wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own
possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself… Freedom
succumbs in this dizziness… and freedom, when it again rises,
The Brothers Karamazov

sees that it is guilty” (COA 61). Their attempts to realize complete

freedom were exhaustive and futile.
Socially isolated by numerous scandals, Dmitri admits to
Alyosha: “I hardly think of anything but of that degraded man…
I think about that man because I am that man myself” (95). Dmitri
now recognizes the innate sinfulness of mankind and perceives
clearly its relation to his personal woes and individual sinfulness. 95
Suddenly Dmitri’s secular trial pales in importance to the trial of
his individual spirit, in which he must overcome merciless
anxiety.
 In an effort to widen the chasm in his relation to the divine,
Ivan declares ‘everything is lawful,’ as both an assertion of
autonomy and an intentional mockery of God’s seemingly absurd
96
Creation. But this principle does not stand. Pale and with evident
‘brain fever,’ Ivan declares of Smerdyakov at Dmitri’s trial: “It
was he, not my brother, who killed our father. He murdered him
and I incited him to do it.” (651) Manifested by his defiance, the
strain on Ivan’s spirit ends in collapse with his devil hallucination
and subsequent ‘catastrophic’ performance at Dmitri’s trial. Guilt
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pervades and his actions begin to be dictated by this.

Robin Feuer Miller offers her own interpretation of the
presence of guilt in both Dmitri and Ivan. Whereas Kierkegaard
associates guilt with the development of the individual self, Miller
concerns herself with “The interrelationship between guilt and
[ethical] responsibility” (Miller 115). In her reading of Dmitri’s
dream sequence and ‘the babe,’ Miller highlights Dmitri’s
conclusion: “We are all responsible for all” (Dostoevsky 560). The
question of Dmitri’s responsibility regarding his treatment of
others is amplified by his suspected perpetration of his father’s
murder. Dmitri’s dream sequence and subsequent self-analysis
lead to his willingness to accept his exile, regardless of his
innocence, shows that Dmitri now observes this ethical
responsibility with newfound primacy: “I go for all, because
someone must go for all. I didn’t kill father, but I’ve got to go”
(Dostoevsky 560).
Ivan, too, discovers his own ethical responsibility related
to the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich. Though Dmitri is formally
accused of his father’s murder, Ivan begins to suspect the guilt of
Fyodor’s servant, Smerdyakov, who had always looked upon Ivan
as a mentor of sorts. “In Ivan’s formulation, ‘everything is
permitted’; there is, likewise, no guilt and no responsibility”
(Miller 111). In the possibility of this formulation’s influence on
the actions of Smerdyakov, Ivan perceives his own responsibility,
his own guilt in the case of his father’s murder: “If it’s not Dmitri,
but Smerdyakov who’s the murderer, I share his guilt, for I put
him up to it” (Dostoevsky 585).
For Kierkegaard, the acknowledgement of this ethical
responsibility does not contradict the notion of individual
development, but rather, within his methodology, the primacy of
ethical responsibility is disputed. In the first place, individual
freedom must become disciplined through recourse with anxiety;
despair must be authentically acknowledged, taken on, and finally
expelled. The revelation of the collective guilt of humanity must
be preceded by the revelation of individual guilt accompanied by
a shift in worldly comportment; only then can the individual
contemplate ethical responsibility1. When exactly this shift occurs
for each person is by no means measurable, and that some sort of
The Brothers Karamazov

shift occurs does not mean that the individual becomes suddenly
complete. As was stated earlier, the individual is always in flux;
individual development is never complete, and the individual

1
As it relates to ‘the other’, Kierkegaard’s methodology can be compared to the
dialogic philosophy of Martin Buber. If “the relation of freedom to guilt is
anxiety” (COA 109), then anxiety as the possibility of guilt is like the possibility
of failing to establish an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with the other. In this type,the
mutual individual freedom and complete and utter difference between individuals 97
is acknowledged and respected. Opposite the I-Thou relationship stands the ‘I-
It’ relationship, one concerned exclusively with the utility of the other. For Buber,
freedom is embodied in the ‘I-Thou’ relationship. See:I and Thou by Martin
Buber and “Ethics and the Place of the Other“ by Neve Gordon from Levinas
and Buber: Dialogue and Difference.
 must remain ever vigilant of the possibility of progression or lapse.
The acknowledgment of the necessity of this vigilance is an
indicator that the individual is ready to make a turn to the ethical.
98
Any attempt at grasping ethical responsibility prior to this
individual discipline of freedom would result in unsightly vanity.
Thus for Kierkegaard, ethical responsibility follows naturally from
the discipline of individual freedom.
Miller’s analysis also acknowledges the importance of the
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individual aspect. She nods to Dmitri’s change in demeanor: “The

hymn that Mitya [Dmitri] at last sounds out to Alyosha expresses
Mitya’s epiphanic dream of the babe as well as the novel’s
epigraph2. The seed has taken root in Mitya; the ‘new man’ hidden
within him has ‘come to the surface’ because of the cruel burden
that has been placed upon him” (Miller 114). This perceived “new
man” arisen in Dmitri expresses his change in worldly
comportment by means of a pathos-filled transition and differs
notably from the woefully anxious Dmitri. Miller questions the
outcome of Ivan’s struggle with despair: “Is the devil’s strategy to
reawaken faith in Ivan or to squelch it forever? Is the devil here
an agent of evil or is he somehow functioning as a way station on
Ivan’s path to eventual spiritual regeneration?” (Miller 121). Miller
too conceives of the polarity of Ivan’s possible conclusions as a
despairing spirit existing before God within the sin/faith
dichotomy. For Miller, the challenge of the devil is a symbol of
Ivan’s exceptional and vehement despair.

2
“Verily, verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.”(John 12:24)
 Movement within the dialectic of sin occurs when the spirit
allows guilt to relate to freedom. The Christian individual
acknowledges the fact that sin represents man’s schism with God
ever since Adam obtained for himself and his descendants
freedom in the knowledge of good and evil. But this
acknowledgement does not inspire existential guilt in the
individual. Dmitri surely lamented his sin, but his demeanor
remained unchanged. Anxiety and despair indicate that sin is
also relevant to him, and is in fact deep-seated in his existence.
This revelation coincides with the individual’s humiliated
freedom, and suddenly the individual understands the full
implications of sin complete with the fullness of his being. From
here, guilt directs the freedom of the individual spirit as it suffers
through its divinely bestowed knowledge, ardently striving to
ascertain the paradigm of the God-man in Christ. Kierkegaard
professes that man’s earthly existence consists solely of this
position before God and is determined by the sin/faith dichotomy.
Guilt may inspire a movement toward faith, or, like Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov

Ivan, rouse impressive and irreverent defiance.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M M, and Caryl Emerson. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.
Blank, Ksana. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin.
Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Print.
Carlisle, Clare. Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming. Albany: State 99
University of New York Press, 2005. Print.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Constance Garnett and Ralph E. Matlaw. The
Brothers Karamazov. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976.
Print.
 Eriksen, Niels Nymann. Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A
Reconstruction. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 2000. Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren, Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. The
Concept of Anxiety. Princeton: Princetion University Press, 1980.
Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. The
Sickness Unto Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Print.
Miller, Robin Feuer. The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel.
New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Print.
nomad
 OLIVIA AWBREY
Olivia Awbrey is a sophomore double-
majoring in comparative literature
and history, with a primary focus on
Spanish literature. She has a strong in-
terest in the Hindi language and lit-
erature, and would one day love to be
fluent in not only Spanish and Hindi,
but also Czech. While she enjoys read-
ing about past and present world cul-
tures, she is naturally nomadic, and
prefers to experience the written
word through travel.

Mentor: Amy Leggette

SEMBENE OUSMANE’S
“TRIBAL SCARS”:
STORYTELLING AS SUSTENANCE IN POST-COLONIAL
SENEGAL

“[Stories] have a kind of power, sometimes an awesome power. And

usually they are necessary for our survival.”

-J. Edward Chamberlin

A story of survival, both in the oral and written form, lives to be

retold. Our most vivid and violent memories become stories we
tell and, turning to J. Edward Chamberlin’s notion, the stories we choose
to share revive an experience of struggle, learning, and even triumph
that, in personal and pivotal ways, sustain us. In his article “From Hand
to Mouth: The Postcolonial Politics of Oral and Written Tradition,”
 Chamberlin claims that, “we need a set of remembered words
and occasions in order to maintain the coherence and continuity
of our societies” (125). Chamberlin argues that storytelling
102
reinforces ideas lost in the past in order to enrich the complexity
of the present and the enigma of the future — simply put, stories
can embody hope. These ideas and stories, often told through
novels or around campfires through oral tradition, are weighted
with cultural significance and purpose.
In 1962 Senegalese writer and film director Sembene
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Ousmane wrote “Tribal Scars.” The short fiction piece was a

response to the slave trade that occurred in Senegal during the
19th and 20th century crusades of colonialism. During these years,
French colonialists invaded Senegal and transformed it into an
economically dependent country—an accessory for the French
slave traders. In “Tribal Scars,” Ousmane captures the frantic
chaos of a Senegalese colonial world at war with itself. It is a
world in which heritage is forgotten and barbaric competition is
first priority; a colonized country that experiences political
oppression, decay of language, and loss of culture - its roots, its
identity.
This essay explores the possibility that storytelling can
revive the past and create a new sense of meaning to sustain an
individual’s identity that was dismantled by colonial rule. In this
sense, I do not mean to argue that an original identity can be
completely restored after a serious disjuncture. The series of
traumatizing events that are symptoms of colonialism leave no
continuity for a natural personal revolution, or a straight path
leading back to an indigenous identity. On the contrary,
colonialism does more to create disparity within a culture than it
does to harmonize a culture into unity. In his essay “Thinking
the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad” Stuart Hall ask the
question, “[if] ‘cultural identity’ carries so many overtones of
essential unity, primordial oneness, indivisibility and sameness,
how are we to ‘think’ identities inscribed within relations of power
and constructed across difference, and disjuncture?”(3) With a
similar perspective to Hall, the actual restoration of a cultural
identity—that is, the norms, beliefs, and behaviors installed in a
community of people—is challenging and nearly impossible. The
changes produced by colonialism are irrevocable and as
permanent as the stories created from the horrific experience of
colonialism.
As sensitive as this issue is, I will convey this exploration
by taking into account both the Senegalese need for cultural
survival and the credibility of a story as a mark of tradition. Frantz
Fanon makes possible the argument that remembering an
“Tribal Scars”

indigenous identity after colonialism is indeed necessary in order

to continue living; Aaron Smuts complicates the sheer concept
of storytelling as a trustworthy medium due to its transitive nature.
It is a fact that colonialism oppressed multiple cultures by
invading their country, substituting the native language with a
foreign tongue, and treating the indigenous population as if they
were strangers to themselves—aliens in their own skin. “Tribal 103
Scars” attests to these demeaning actions while expressing the
need to retell a story as an act of resistance towards colonial
oppression.
 In Ousmane’s piece exists a story within a story—a kind
of meta-telling of how one Senegalese tribe broke apart after being
invaded by colonists. The story produces three tellers, as the
104
story itself has three layers. Ousmane, the author, creates a scene
set in post-independence Senegal, in which a group of men gather
to hear a story. Within this group of men is the character Saer, a
man born after independence, who tells a story to the others. The
third teller is the character Amoo, who emerges in Saer’s spoken
story, and lives in the conditions of French-Senegalese
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colonialism. In Amoo’s story begins the restatement of resistance

against colonialism: colonists looted his tribe and captured his
daughter, and his need is to both rescue her and return to his
village. The structure of the story itself justifies Chamberlin’s
notion: that storytelling is essential for our survival. These
characters depend on each other, as one creates the world in which
the next character will emerge.
First, before moving to my argument, I must point out the
undeniable challenge the topic of storytelling presents. Stories,
both in oral and written form, are more than truthful reiterations;
bias and perspective organically taint them. Out of this problem
a question arises: if the act of storytelling carries facets of
humanity—history, creeds, emotions, traditions—can storytelling
achieve a viable sustainablity to overcome the invasive usurping
of an identity? To answer this, I turn to the story “Tribal Scars”
itself to explain why storytelling can, in fact, rediscover an
identity.
“Tribal Scars” is set in post-colonial Senegal and begins
with a group of Senegalese men gathered and chatting around a
table. When normally the conversation would lead to local and
global politics, their talk turns to the scars that mark some of
their faces. No one sitting in the circle can answer why or how
they came to have these scars. Many propose stories of the scars’
origins, like “it was a mark of nobility” (102) or that perhaps a
member of the tribe was cut as a punishment for rejecting tribal
customs after being educated in Europe. All of these propositions
are dismissed. One man, Saer, claims he knows. He says French
slave-traders sought their bodies for work and their skin for
apparel; the Senegalese tribe would cut their own bodies to ruin
their skin and save themselves from slavery.
The story Saer tells creates the third layer of the story’s
structure and presents a new character: Amoo, a Senegalese man
captured and taken from his village by French colonists. Amoo
is rescued by Momutu, a Senegalese rebel whose scheme is to
rescue slaves from colonists, only to barter them off again as slaves
for his own capital gain. While Amoo only wants to rescue his
“Tribal Scars”

daughter, Iome, from slavery, Momutu wants to restrain Amoo

and Iome from returning to their village—to traditional culture.
A power-struggle between these two native Senegalese men, who
are both puppets to colonialism but uphold different values,
ensues.
Near the end of “Tribal Scars,” during a surprise invasion
by French colonists, Amoo and Iome escape from Momutu’s grip. 105
Together they retreat back to their village, where their tribe eagerly
awaits their arrival. For a full summer Amoo, Iome, and the tribe
live peaceful lives in the community: they hunt and gather, have
 tribal dances around fires, and continue the rituals into which
they were born. However, the tribe understands their location is
endangered, because they’ve already endured one looting from
106
French colonists. They plan to relocate at the end of summer.
When their day of relocation arrives, “not a sacred day, but a day
like any other,” (Ousmane, 115) colonists attack Amoo’s tribe.
He escapes with his daughter and mother, but at a cost. The only
way to ensure that Iome will not be recaptured into slavery is to
make cuts across her body and lessen her capital value as an item
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of the slavery market:

Swiftly, Amoo gripped the girl between his strong legs and
began making cuts all over her body. The child’s cries
rang through the forests; she screamed till she had no voice
left. Amoo just had time to finish before slave-hunters
seized him. He had wrapped the leaves all round the
girl...Iome returned to the village with her grandmother,
and thanks to the old woman’s knowledge of herbs Iome’s
body soon healed; but she still bore the scars... The
slave-hunters returned to the village; they capture Iome
but let her go again. She was worth nothing, because of
the blemishes on her body. (116)
When Amoo makes this violent act upon his daughter’s skin, he
simultaneously upholds the pride of his culture and his people.
He sacrifices himself as a slave to the colonists, and sacrifices his
daughter’s body to permanent physical damage in order to save
Iome from slavery. Though Iome undergoes indescribable pain,
she later on evades the clutches of slavery only because scars
render her undesirable to the slavers.
 Hearing Saer’s iteration of the story, the Senegalese men
gathered around the table can imagine how their scars are
important; they can understand why the scars not marks of shame,
but marks of pride. Saer tells them, “The news [of the scars
success] spread... People came from the remotest villages to
consult the grandmother. And over the years and the centuries a
diversity of scars appeared on the bodies of our ancestors” (116).
In this moment, through the telling of the story, the men are
reminded of the defining root of their “cultural identity.” The
scars represent their past, while the story of the scars creates
continuity between what their culture was before colonialism,
and what it is now, after their independence. Without the story
of the origin of the scars, they would be only enigmatic marks left
on a forgotten body. In this sense, the story of the scars does not
mend the gaps from the past to the present, but the tale of survival
ignites hope in the Senegalese men.
I wonder, however, why Saer’s account is trusted most
“Tribal Scars”

out of all of them. He is the only character who is half Senegalese

and half Voltaique, which means he is half French. This is
problematic only in that, if this story is meant to represent the
culture as a unified entity that overcame colonialism, can it be
told by Saer, who half represents the culture that dominated
Senegal? I would argue that even the slightest hint of imaginative
cultural coherence—in a word, hope—can weave together a torn
107
community. The reality Saer presents through his story is one of
ancestral honor, which retells the Senegalese experience as if it

were a revered artifact. In this light, J. Edward Chamberlin frames

 storytelling as a way to look at the past through eyes hungry for

cultural meaning. He writes:

This world, the world of imagination, is not a world in
108
which we escape reality but one by means of which we
engage reality on terms that reflect our own meanings and
values. If our words and our several modes of imaginative
representation are replaced by others that are not the
reflection of our hearts and minds and experiences and
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the heritage of our people, then so is our sense of reality.

(127)
Saer’s explanation of their scars, which saved some Senegalese
from slavery, not only connects them to their past, to a
peacefulness lost in the wake of French colonialism, but it also
attributes meaning to a haunting wound. In addition, Ousmane
presents the text’s structure in a meta-story: as Saer retreats into
his past to retell the story, Ousmane himself delves into the depths
of colonialism through imagination. If the story is still told, it’s
possible that the emotional aspect of the experience can still
persist. Colonialism affects its subjects not only physically, but
mentally as well.
Frantz Fanon proves the ruined state of a colonized mind.
Fanon claims in The Wretched of the Earth that colonialism
“hammer[s] into the heads of the indigenous population that if
the colonists were to leave they would regress into barbarism,
degradation, and bestiality,” and consequently a colonized nation
“achieves cultural alienation” (149). Colonialism creates a
relationship between the colonist and the colonized that is
obviously unequal. By feeling lorded-over and of base value, the
colonized population cowers under the colonist’s raised foot and
willingly abandons their personal values and behaviors—what
sustains them—in order to appease the colonists. This means
that the indigenous people become strangers to their own skin;
they are physically and psychologically injured by the colonizing
nation. In this state of oppression, the colonized nation is separated
from their identity, where they were once at home.
In Fanon’s schema of colonial consciousness, the
indigenous people are convinced that their language, their
behavior, and their perspectives of life are worthless, unless
mandated by colonial rule. Rather than being the independent
nation it was, the colonized nation becomes dependent on the
colonists, as if they need to be subjugated in order to survive.
Fanon, likening the overbearing nation to an abusive mother,
states, “The colonial mother is protecting the child [the colonized]
from itself, from its ego, physiology, its biology and its ontological
misfortune,” (149). It means that not only are the indigenous
“Tribal Scars”

people severed from their natural state of being, but they mentally
turn against themselves and become disgusted with their original
way of life—the way of life that formally sustained them.
Fanon’s indictment of cultural alienation in colonialism
provides a framework for understanding Momutu’s experience
of loss in “Tribal Scars.” One evening, loosened under the
exhaustion of a day’s trek, Momutu reminisces to Amoo about 109
his past:
I once had a village, too, on the edge of a forest. My
mother and father lived there, many relatives – a whole
 clan! We had meat to eat and sometimes fish. But over
the years, the village declined. There was no end to
lamentations. Ever since I was born I’d heard nothing but
110
screams, seen mad flights into the bush or the forest. You
go into the forest, and you die from some disease; you
stay in the open, and you’re captured to be sold into
slavery. What was I to do? Well, I made my choice. I’d
rather be with the hunters than the hunted. (111)
From hearing his villagers scream in disarray and confusion, and
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seeing his own people torn from their huts and fields and stolen
away on French ships, Momutu is mentally tortured. He grew
from child to man in the midst of constant violence, chaos and
cultural decay. He had a choice to either remain with his tribe--
“the hunted”-- or join the colonizers--“the hunters”-- and with
that came the sacrifice of either his life or his culture; he chose to
sacrifice his culture. Momutu illustrates Fanon’s definition of
the colonized mind. Fanon states that, “the young colonized
subject who grows up in an atmosphere of fire and brimstone has
no scruples mocking zombie ancestors, two-headed horses,
corpses woken from the dead, and djinns who, taking advantage
of a yawn, slip inside the body,” (21). These cultural traditions
and creeds exemplify what a colonized child would soon reject
in order to overcome his state of repression and oppression. The
colonized purposely isolate their culture while painfully accepting
the colonist culture as their own.
Though Amoo has experienced violence the way Momutu
has, colonial rule has not entirely tainted him. Momutu remarks
that Amoo is “‘an odd fellow. He thinks of nothing but his village,
his wife and his daughter,’” (107). It’s true: Amoo admits he has
killed men, “‘but,’” Amoo says, “‘never to take prisoners and sell
them as slaves. That’s your work [Momutu’s work], but it isn’t
mine. I want to get back to my village,” (107). While Amoo’s
dedication to his family strikes Momutu as weak or strange, Amoo
sees returning to his tribe as the natural thing to do. His identity
resides in his village. He has not succumbed to colonialism at its
worst, the way Momutu has. He retains a sense of pride in his
traditional way of life. Finding solace in his family and his people,
Amoo understands that in order to survive, he must sustain his
life by leaving an irrevocable blemish on his daughter. After Amoo
cuts Iome, she is recaptured into slavery. However, because of
her ruined skin, they release her. The story of the scars’ success
spreads to other villages and the Senegalese use scarring to exempt
themselves from slavery. Amoo’s and Iome’s courage is so
powerful, and the scars so lasting, that their story withstands the
mill of time. Passing from generation to generation, it finally
falls out of Saer’s mouth and into the ears of the wondering
“Tribal Scars”

Senegalese men.
While Saer’s story of the scars’ salvation, of triumph
through sacrifice, provokes the vision of a desired identity, Aaron
Smuts’s article “Story Identity and Story Type” challenges the
notion that storytelling is a transaction of simple ‘telling.’ There
are issues with every story’s credibility. Stories are often
exaggerations sprinkled with elements of reality. However, stories 111
themselves have representative identities. According to Smuts,
a story can present an identity for the listener or reader to perceive,
however the story also contains its own set of ideals or values
 that builds a unique “story-identity” (5). It’s likely that Saer’s story-
identity has mutated throughout its progression. Smuts argues,
“the foundational claim underlying nearly all narrative theory is
112
that a distinction can be made between the story and its telling,”
(5). Smuts argues that the “transposability of the story,” is
essentially the act of retelling, and it inevitably omits details
included in the original narrative. The story must pass through a
kind of metaphorical and unspoken sieve that routinely filters
bits and pieces of information, depending on the teller or author.
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Smuts claims “it is rare to tell the same story twice,” (12) because
each time the story will take on new meaning, inherit perhaps a
different sequence or a different main character, and morph into
a new identity. Much of the story’s identity conforms to the way
of the teller or writer and, subsequently, how the audience
perceives the story.
With respect to “Tribal Scars,” both Sembene Ousmane—
the author—and Saer—the fictional story-passer—create a unique
story-identity that can be perceived as historical evidence of the
Senegalese cultural past. What they tell and write is consequently
selective due to their personal bias—both embody a Senegalese
identity as well as a French identity. However, this does not mean
that their stories are incorrect or unbelievable. It simply means
that the stories they tell have been molded to their particular
interpretation. The way the tellers of “Tribal Scars” retell the
sequence of events—like Amoo’s past, his experience in slavery,
and his route to escape it—creates a specific story-identity that
represents their personal perspective. In terms of the credibility
or identity of Saer’s narrative, it would naturally have gaps. The
story of the tribal scars was passed along to multiple villages
through many mouths and, inevitably, it will have changed along
the way. Accuracy then becomes second in importance. The
story’s identity—that is, the values and empowerment it projects—
trumps the story’s precise “transposability.” It will be sustained
through each telling of it, only because, reflecting from Aaron
Smuts’ essay, the essentials of a story are captured in the repetitive
events, characters, setting and conclusion.
The story-identity in “Tribal Scars” has a visceral quality,
which the Senegalese men can feel through its telling. It embodies
their past, the strength of those who stood aggressively and
proudly against slavery, and the reason to remember, appreciate,
and move forward and onward from their oppressed state. It
tells of blood and wounds, battles and sacrifices, loss and gain of
both the colonists and the colonized. But more than the pitfalls
and successes of colonialism, it reminds the Senegalese men that
they are alive and free. Like the push of an overpowering gust of
“Tribal Scars”

wind, the story of their scars brings forth the energy that Amoo,
Iome and many other anti-colonial and anti-slavery Africans put
towards clearing their country of invasive rule.
But a question remains: can the story-identity really
translate into a personal identity? In the article “The Revival of
Storytelling,” Haike Frank claims the process of storytelling:
can be seen as the storyteller’s contribution to the identity 113
construction of a social community, in the sense that the
member of the audience acquires the ability to see him- or
herself with the eyes of his or her environment and thus
 experience him- or herself as an Other...[this] is an
inevitable step in developing into a self. (288)
The process of “developing into a self” means that an
114
individual inherits values or experiences and allows the
experience of another person to enter them and become a part of
them in order to have a “self” or an identity. Upon hearing the
experience of another, the listener embodies the experience, or
behavioral practice of another to make it a part of herself or
himself. This notion creates a model of living that can easily be
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adapted into an attribute of the self. How possible is it, then, for
a story to recreate a cultural identity for the Senegalese men? If
Aaron Smuts’s article claims that rarely stories are told identical
to their original form, then could a story so shifted from its original
form restore a precolonial identity? Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
problematizes the notion of identity restoration further.
In “Toward a Critical Theory of Postcolonial African
Identities,” Eze underlines the inconsistencies within
rediscovering a self after colonialism:
Between the truths and myths in their fictional energy
imposed at the very depths of our being, and the more
objective truths provided by reflective and critical analysis,
it is the field of the imaginary representations that carries
the heaviest weight in the determination of conduct and
collective orientation. Thus, when this “zone”—the zone
of the social imaginary—is “distorted” or “diseased” and
“inflamed,” our actions and “knowledge” become
systematically distorted as well. (343-344)
In other words, if the atmosphere surrounding a culture becomes
so infested with the harsh confusion and “diseased” mentality of
colonialism, the idea of “identity” or “actions and ‘knowledge’”
of the self drastically shifts from what it originally was. The
“imaginary representations” that define the borders and
mechanics of a culture are no longer their legitimate roots, because
those roots have been ripped from their traditional, natural ground
and contorted in a way that is alien. War, mangled bodies, and
the captive human life represent their culture. Eze argues this
state is severe enough that returning to cultural roots is
unthinkable. The identity once defined by the precolonial
Senegalese is not one to be necessarily rediscovered or restored;
rather, it needs to be reinvented. Therefore, is it even possible to
regain an identity through stories that may be more fictional than
real? Eze claims it is nearly impossible to completely restore an
identity with its original values and form, but that does not mean
it is impossible to overcome the hardships of colonialism.
Recalling Chamberlin’s argument, storytelling provides
cultural relevance to help remember a desired identity. In an
attempt to convinced colonized peoples that reinvention is
“Tribal Scars”

possible, and fueled by the sheer gumption of a proud storyteller

and resistor of colonialism, Fanon articulates:
Let us delve deeper; perhaps this passion and this rage are
nurtured or at least guided by the secret hope of
discovering beyond the present wretchedness, beyond this
self-hatred, this abdication and denial, some magnificent
and shining era that redeems us in our own eyes and those 115
of others. (149)
Fanon’s statement is based on empowerment. Surely, the process
of decolonizing a mind depends on more than just reinforcing
 old ideas or practices. Reinvention of cultural identity through
storytelling is more plausible than actual restoration.
Though they are often myths, and their reality easily bent,
116
stories are facets of human identity. They are intangible capsules
of human experience carrying meaning and dialogue from the
past into the present. They are plump with history and yet
weighted with emotion—but they also make us look at ourselves.
Developing into a self means critically evaluating our own
personal experience in order to see our actions, our past, our
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identity in retrospect. Rather than the story engulfing the listener

or reader, it becomes a palette of experience, one from which the
listener can pick and choose what they find meaningful. And
though stories are selective in their reiteration, the listener or
reader makes a compromise in order to understand the narrative.
In a similar sacrifice, J. Edward Chamberlin writes, “the
way in which people define themselves may occasionally
accommodate a forgetting of some of the events in their past, but
will always require a remembering of the words that constitute
their history,” (127). Despite the destruction of colonialism, the
difficulties of transposing a story word-for-word from one
generation to the next, the issue of original cultural identity, and
perhaps the near impossibility of truly reclaiming an indigenous
identity, stories still contain cultural significance. Even though
they are filtered through time—through a metaphorical sieve—
and bring only a single perspective, the single perspective contains
in it an entire world of meaning, and with that, the power of
endurance to restate and restore national and cultural identity.
In the short story Sembene Ousmane creates, Saer, Amoo and the
Senegalese men use the story of their past to reinvent their cultural
identity and proudly wear their scars.
Stories uncover the remnants of our past. Remembered
only through the cultural filter that so many mouths and hands
have used to spread the tales, stories are heavy with fiction and
drama, but also lifted by truth and reality. A story expresses a
cultural identity. Whether it comes from a single author through
a piece of writing, or stems from a community that thrives on
oral tradition, a story always serves to sustain curiosity through
mystery and, perhaps, deepen the enigma, making room for more
accounts to be told.

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. “From Hand to Mouth: The Postcolonial

Politics of Oral and Written Tradition.” Reclaiming Indigenous
Voice and Vision. Ed. Marie Ann Battiste. Vancouver: UBC Press,
2000. 124-141. Print.
Eze, Emmanuel C.”Toward a Critical Theory of Postcolonial African
Identities.” Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader.
Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1997. Print.
“Tribal Scars”

Fanon, Frantz, and Richard Philcox. The Wretched of the Earth. New
York: Grove Press, 2004. Print.
Frank, Haike. “The Revival of Storytelling.” Towards a Transcultural
Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-Colonial World. Ed.
Geoffery V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 285-298. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad.”
Small Axe 6: September 1999, 1-18. Print.
Ousmane, Sembene. “Tribal Scars.” Tribal Scars and Other Stories.
Portsmouth: NH. Heinemann, 1987. Print.
Smuts, Aaron. “Story Identity and Story Type.” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism. 67.1 (2009): 5-13. Print. 117
 KAYLA MEEHAN
Kayla Meehan is majoring in both
comparative literature and romance
languages. Her current languages of
focus are French and Italian. She is
studying abroad in both France and
Italy during the summer of 2011 and
the 2011-2012 school year.

Mentor: Rachel Eccleston

“BEGUN BY LIVING ACTORS,

IS ENDED BY AUTOMATONS”:
A DISCOURSE OF [POST]HUMANISM AND DISCONTINUITY
IN THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND

Elle est retrouvée,

Quoi? — L’Éternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.
-Rimbaud

T he sea has represented for humanity the concept of boundlessness,

continuity—infinity. The question of sustainability never quavers
within the fluidity and vastness of the sea. It was. It will be. Juxtaposed
with humanity, the sea illuminates the contrast between two ideas:
discontinuity and continuity. These representations are made acute and
jagged with the waves of the sea dying against the shore. The images of
human and sea represent two different ideas—standing upon the
shifting sand of the shoreline: the feet of humanity—contemplating
the infinite. We are mortal. Michel Houellebequ in his novel, The
Possibility of an Island, translated by Gavin Bowd, enters into
critical discourse with these concepts of finitude and immortality.
The sting of this conceptual theory is felt fully in the contrast of
sustainability and fragility. “So this is what men had called the
sea, what they had considered this great consoler, the great
destroyer as well, the one that erodes, that gently puts an end to
things. . . I understood better, now, how the idea of the infinite
had been able to germinate in the brain of these primates; the
idea of an infinity. . .” (Houellebequ, 335). Houellebequ’s
characters, Daniel1 and those following, become the
representation of the discourse between that of humanism and
that which comes after—[post]humanism.
Daniel1 is a human living in the twenty-first century. His
narrative is chronological and depicts his own life story and
existence, but it is frequently interrupted by subsequent narratives
The Possibility of an Island

of other Daniels. Daniel24’s narrative is introduced and it is

implied that there have been twenty-two other Daniels living
before him as a form, or copy of Daniel1. Daniel1 is a wealthy
movie producer and director who obsesses about aging and sex
and describes himself as “an abrasive humanist” (15). He moves
from country to country falling in love with various women before
finally joining the religion that promises to grant him and his 119
beloved dog, Fox, tangible eternal life through cellular cryogenics.
But it is through Daniel24’s narrative that the history (that is, the
future of Daniel1’s progeny) of humanity is ambiguously and
 slowly unveiled. It is bleak. It is isolating. It is a dystopia with
few remnants and pieces of humanity left. Although the copies
of Daniel1 are unaware of the specificities of humanity’s demise,
120
it is their narratives that transmit and assemble the only remaining
fragments of humanity’s history. All of the Daniels following
Daniel1 are referred to as “neohumans”—they are genetically
identical to Daniel1 save for the significant technological
advancements added to their physical bodies; though intensely
ambiguous, the bodily construction of the beings following
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Daniel1 never suffer from illness nor are they ever in want of
food or water.
The neohumans’ thoughts are chronicled through their
own narratives as they read through Daniel1’s autobiography in
an attempt to understand their origin, and their position in the
utterly deviant and [post]human world surrounding them. They
spend the majority of their respective time journaling in
contemplation of Daniel1’s narrative and reflecting on the previous
means of humanity’s sustenance, especially that pertaining to
sexuality and intimacy—a part of the sensations that Daniel24
and Daniel25 are unable to experience or understand.
Humanity’s need for intimacy works as a validation for
the establishment of a true and meaningful existence that goes
beyond the superficiality of want. Daniel1’s obsession is sex. It is
what drives him.
Throughout my entire life I hadn’t been interested in
anything other than my cock, now my cock was dead,
and I was in the process of following it in its deathly
decline, I had only got what I deserved, I told myself
 repeatedly, pretending to find in this some morose
delectation, while in fact my mental state was evolving
more and more toward horror pure and simple, a horror
made all the worse by the constant brutal heat, by the
immutable glare of the blue sky. (243)
If Daniel1’s “cock” is lifeless, so is the entirety of his self—
sexuality is a means of sustenance for Daniel. In his book, Erotism:
Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille analyzes humanity’s
discontinuity and examines the brief interludes of experienced
continuity. Humanity, as discontinuous beings, yearns for feelings
of continuity. Moments of continuity, Bataille argues, can only
be established via eroticism. Bataille describes instances of
fulfilled passion as “violent agitation” that leads to continuity
that is felt in “the anguish of desire” (19). Continuity through sex,
or eroticism, is sustenance for Daniel1. Bataille writes, “The whole
business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living
being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal
state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of
The Possibility of an Island

the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity” (17). In his

hours of intimacy, Daniel1 finds short moments of continuity and
infinitude with other humans.
According to Bataille, “Eroticism is assenting to life even
in death” (11). He describes the visceral experience and the point
of intellectual contact where thought meets instinct:
Beyond death. . .begins the inconceivable which we are 121
usually not brave enough to face . . . the inconceivable is
the expression of our own impotence. We know that death
destroys nothing, leaves the totality of existence intact,
 but we still cannot imagine the continuity of being as a
whole beyond our own death, or whatever it is that dies
in us (141).
122
The aging of Daniel1 causes the inability to participate in
eroticism, meaning the end to moments of continuity and leaving
only the prospect of death without his means of sustenance. For
Bataille, the yearning for infinitude is only realized fleetingly
throughout a human’s life through shared erotic moments with
another discontinuous being.
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Considering Schopenhauer, Daniel1 writes, “When the

sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life
is consumed; thus, he notes in a metaphor of terrifying violence,
‘human existence resembles a theater performance which, begun
by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same
costumes.’ I didn’t want to become an automaton. . . What is the
point of maintaining a body that no one touches?” (Houellebequ
154). The impulse towards and obsession with sexual intercourse
recorded throughout Daniel1’s narrative demonstrates his
acknowledgement of eroticism as sustenance. The “automaton”
seems an ominous foreshadowing of neohumanity’s lack of
eroticism—an idea that entrances Daniel25. His inability to
comprehend the sensations associated with sex and intimacy only
intensifies his fascination.
Between the interludes of eroticism, humanity craves
continuity. Humanity has never been satiated in its yearning for
immortality. “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who
perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure,
but we yearn for our lost continuity” (Bataille 15). It is in this
hazy and unclear post space of the fear of discontinuity that
humanity, spurred on by a relentless aversion to finitude,
encounters the possibility of continuity through means of copies.
The discourse between humanism and [post]humanism is realized
by Daniel1’s successors by means of the body. Bataille writes:
“the body is a thing, vile, slavish, servile, just like a stone or a
piece of wood” (150). In searching for continuity, the body
becomes a tool, or “thing,” that is used to experience various and
brief sensations of continuity. All of the beings following Daniel1
are hyper-aware of the duality of nature that resides within them
and fractures their internal subjectivities. Being surrounded by
the dystopian world and de-evolved humanity, signifies the beings
are in a “post” human realm.
The formulation of the word “[post]humanism” (as used
here) while incorporating some elements of posthumanism as a
philosophical and literary discourse, is defined in this context as
the era of time coming after that of humanism; humanism being
a general and broad discourse begging the question “what does it
The Possibility of an Island

mean to be human and suffer from discontinuity?”

[Post]humanism is the correspondence between the time following
humanity and the philosophical and literary discourse of
posthumanism and its relation to humanism. [Post]human
obligates a change in the idea of sustainability and questions what
is elemental to the continuation of humanity in these new realms
of thought. The Possibility of an Island moves away from the 123
existential crisis of the human condition as epicenter and instead
examines humanity in respect to a dystopian and new, or
neohuman future. Eugene Thacker in his essay “Data Made Flesh”
 describes and more precisely classifies a particular type of
posthumanism relevant to [post]humanism:
This type of posthumanism—which I will generally refer
124
to as ‘extropianism’—is that it consciously models itself
as a type of humanism. That is, like the types of humanisms
associated with the Enlightenment, the humanism of
extropianism places at its center certain unique qualities
of the human—self-awareness, consciousness and
reflection, self-direction and development, the capacity
nomad

for scientific and technological progress, and the valuation

of rational thought (74-75).
More precisely, [post]humanism is the time following humanity’s
embrace of Thacker’s posthumanism subclass “extropianism.” It
is through the character of Daniel1 in Houellebequ’s novel that
[post]humanism is invoked and brought into critical discourse
with the old ideals of humanism and their potential for stagnation
in the future. The prophet of the religion that promises Daniel1
immortality makes the proclamation of a new future: “‘I am the
zero point and you are the first wave. Today, we are entering a
different era, where the passing of time no longer has the same
meaning. Today, we enter eternal life. This moment will be
remembered.’” (Houellebeq 207).
Daniel24 and Daniel25 spend their bleak lives pouring over
Daniel1’s narrative, attempting to comprehend their significance
and existence as a post humanity while being in constant reference
to Daniel1: “We were ourselves incomplete beings, beings in
transition, whose destiny was to prepare for the coming of a digital
future” (156). These “after” beings all come from the original—
they are copies of Daniel1. They refer to themselves as neohumans,
but in being merely copies and originating from a being of a
different age, they are more accurately defined as beings which
come after humans—[post]humans. Daniel1 is represented
through the copied beings that follow him. But they are all only
able to mimic him and attempt to represent the man that came
eons before them in an effort to imitate a continuity of being.
Daniel24 writes “we no longer really have any specific objective;
the joys of humans remain unknowable to us . . . Our nights are
no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go
through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief
to us” (5). Bataille addresses the fundamental problem of pursuing
such a concept of copies and mimicry:
. . . try to imagine yourself changing from the state you are
in to one in which your whole self is completely doubled;
you cannot survive this process since the doubles you have
turned into are essentially different from you. Each of these
doubles is necessarily distinct from you as you are now.
The Possibility of an Island

To be truly identical with you, one of the doubles would

have to be actually continuous with the other, and not
distinct from it as it would have become. Imagination
boggles at this grotesque idea. (14)
The duplicity felt by these [post]humans is piercing and gradually
becomes more poignant as the copies draw their understanding
from their origin’s narrative. But the longer the duration of time 125
Daniel25 spends reflecting on Daniel1’s writings, the more
Daniel25’s feelings lose precise stoicism and exactitude. Daniel25
writes: “Love seems to have been for humans of the final period,
 the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal
point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated.
The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly
126
sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points
of views, is in this regard characteristic” (132). The copies of
Daniel1 are able to understand the world around them through
the only instrument they are given—Daniel1’s narrative. They
struggle to mold themselves to their only authentic human
nomad

reference: “Despite my close reading of the narrative by Daniel1,

I had still not totally understood what men meant by love, I had
not grasped all the multiple and contradictory meanings they gave
to this term; I had grasped the brutality of sexual combat, the
unbearable pain of emotional isolation, but still I could not see
what it was that enabled them to hope that they could establish
between these contradictory aspirations a form of synthesis” (311).
Daniel24 and Daniel25 are [post]human shadows of Daniel1.
Having only Daniel1’s narrative for reference and living the
duration of their lives in seclusion, they are unable to process the
complexity and intricacy of their feelings. They are torn between
humanism, a notion which for them represents sustenance
dependent upon intimacy with other discontinuous beings and
the isolation which follows.
But Daniel25’s thoughts become ever more
discombobulated and hint at a fullness of sentiment that was
utterly vacant in the beginnings of his narrative as he continues
to dissect Daniel1’s story. Being [post]human and constantly in
reference to the human that preceded him, he seeks out meaning
and validation for his existence. Like Daniel1, he turns to his
body in an attempt to understand: “At every minute of my life,
since its beginning, I had remained conscious of my breathing, of
the kinesthetic equilibrium of my organism, of its fluctuating
central state” (305). In his reflective moments and efforts to
connect to someone, or something, he realizes that his only
connection to the era of his life, [post]humanism, is his body. He
yearns to understand humanity and the act which sustained and
later caused Daniel1 to take his own life—sexuality. Daniel25
writes,
The incredible importance accorded to sexual matters
among humans has always plunged their neohuman
commentators into horrified amazement. It was
nonetheless painful to see Daniel1 gradually come closer
to the Evil Secret. . .it was painful to feel him gradually
overcome by the consciousness of a truth that, once
revealed, could only annihilate him. . . The truth, in
The Possibility of an Island

Daniel1’s time, began to be unearthed; it became more and

more clear, and more and more difficult to hide, that the
true goals of men, the only ones they would have pursued
spontaneously if it were still possible for them to do so,
were of an exclusively sexual nature. For us neohumans,
it is a genuine stumbling block. (226)
Daniel1 succumbs to the “Evil Secret,” or life lived in absolute 127
reference to sexuality. Daniel1’s search for meaning and continuity
through eroticism, is what leads him to his death upon the loss of
his lover and feeling that he is too old to find another.
 Daniel25 is haunted by the want of wanting. He desires to
feel something towards the faded degenerate race of humanity
that he observes out of his windows while attempting to
128
comprehend the original species from which he descended.
Daniel25 decides to leave the safety of his protected house and
venture out beyond the barricades that enclose his small existence.
Upon doing so he finally encounters devolved humanity face to
face in its new form. Over the course of hundreds of years, those
humans who did not look to the future or diligently work to invest
nomad

their money in gene cryogenics have faded into oblivion. Though

indefinite, through the narratives of Daniel24 and Daniel25 it is
clear that humanity has suffered from degeneration—humanity
has become animal again. The copies of Daniel1 maintain extreme
levels of security surrounding their property in order to maintain
distance from the “packs” of humans. In humanity’s de-evolution,
isolated and with no physical contact with another neohuman,
the necessity to find continuity in some other becomes vital for
means of sustenance. Daniel25’s decision to have sex with one of
the “devolved” human females is generated by his insatiable
longing for understanding. Bataille writes, “There is nothing really
illusory in the truth of love; the beloved being is indeed equated
for the lover,—and only for him no doubt, but what of that?—
with the truth of existence. Chance may will it that through that
being, the world’s complexities laid aside, the lover may perceive
the true deeps of existence and their simplicity” (21).
Needless to say, Daniel25 does not find what he is searching
for; the outcome is nauseating and unsuccessful while leaving
him more confused and distraught than before: “I knew that I
was dealing with baleful, unhappy, and cruel creatures; it was
not among them that I would find love, or its possibility, nor any
of the ideals that fueled the daydreams of our human predecessors;
they were only like the caricature-like residues of the worst
tendencies of ordinary mankind . . .” (320). Daniel25’s quest for
understanding through sexual experience, like the age before him,
comes to an end after this harsh and deranged event. “The stink
was less unbearable but still very strong, her teeth were small,
rotten, and black. I gently pushed her away, got dressed again . .
. signaling to her not to come back” (319). The demise of humanity
is all too severe for Daniel25 to understand humanity through
means of sexuality. Thus, Daniel25 decides to press on with his
journey, with only his dog Fox as his companion searching for
sustenance beyond sexuality.
Throughout his narrative, the only thing that Daniel25 is
able to get emotionally close to, and the only thing that makes
him realize that he is capable of understanding humanity is the
loss of his dog. Cora Diamond examines humanity’s relationship
The Possibility of an Island

with animals in her essay “The Animal.” She writes, “Morality

resides there, as most radical means of thinking the finitude that
we share with animals, the morality that belongs to the very
finitude of life, to the experience of compassion...the anguish of
this vulnerability” (396). Humanity and animal affiliation runs
deeper than the feeling of protector or pity—we share a finitude,
a sense of mortality with them. Along with them, we are beings 129
that suffer from discontinuity. Daniel24 writes about his copy of
Fox, “Above all, he likes me to take him in my arms, and rest like
that, bathed in sunshine, his eyes closed, his head placed on my
 knees, in a happy half-sleep. We sleep together, and every morning
is a festival of licks and scratches from his little paws; it is an
obvious joy for him to be reunited with life and daylight” (52).
130
The obvious attachment to Fox that both Daniel24 and Daniel25
share is expressed liberally throughout their narratives. Daniel24
begins to describe his “deterioration,” something akin to death
for neohumans, and proceeds to speak of his only companion,
Fox. “The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact
that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple
nomad

things, his ego is so limited” (5). Within each of the subsequent

narratives, it becomes increasingly evident that Fox is the most
crucial point and aspect in all of the Daniels’ life stories. Each
description of Fox made by Daniel24 and Daniel25 is approached
more tenderly than other philosophical and nihilistic
observations. Bataille writes, “In contrast to transcendence, which
designates the relation of knowledge between a subject and object
“immanence” means a state of continuity between beings whose
isolation and separation from each other has disappeared” (xix)1.
In Daniel24’s case, his copy of Fox senses the deterioration of his
master and the two creatures bond as they prepare to pass on
together.
A slight cold has invaded my extremities; it is the sign
that I am entering the final hours. Fox senses it, moans
softly, licks my toes. I have already seen Fox die several
times, before being replaced by his replica; I have known

1
Bataille as quoted in: Van, De P.M. “Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, Eds.,
Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought.” Philosopy in
Review 25.4 (2005): 235-236. Print.
 the closing of his eyes, the cardiac rhythm which stops
without altering the profound, animal peace of those
beautiful brown eyes. I cannot attain that wisdom, no
neohuman will be able to attain it really; I can only get
closer to it, and slow down voluntarily the rhythm of my
breath and mental projections. (116)
As Daniel24 describes, intimacy for the [post]human is best
understood through the companionship with an animal,
specifically Fox.
In Cary Wolfe’s article “Exposures,” he describes the
thought process that has to occur in order for humanity to reach
a certain understanding and meaning within the world shared
with other animals: “It is not by denying the special status of
‘human being’ but rather, as it were, by intensifying it so that we
can come to think of nonhuman animals not as bearers of
‘interests’ or as ‘right holders’ but rather as something much more
compelling: ‘fellow creatures’” (15). This concept of “fellow The Possibility of an Island
creature” can only be fully understood through the lens of the
[post]human. This description of the instance of passing on shared
by both Daniel24 and his closest companion, an animal, is only a
shadow of a critical revelation and eventual understanding in
the Daniels’ saga. As Daniel24’s life ebbs away and as Daniel25
finally makes the decision to leave his house and seek out other
forms of existence, the importance of the Daniels’ origins is made
clear and brought into full discourse with posthumanism. Fox’s 131
existence begins to represent something deeper and far more
significant than merely a companion that offers solace and
company to the Daniels. In finding another discontinuous being
 and subjecting himself to vulnerability, Daniel25 becomes the
epitome and end product of an evolutionary experience. He finally
becomes that which all Daniels, especially Daniel1 had attempted
132
to become, a true [post]human. All of it is accomplished through
his relationship with his dog, Fox.
This posthumanist thought is critical and reexamines the
concept of the rights of animals and their treatment. The affinity
between human and animal goes beyond the concept of an
nomad

animal’s helplessness and innocence. It is not purity that captures

our attention so aggressively when met with the concept of a
shared mortality. In another work by Diamond, “The Difficulty
of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” she hauntingly
describes the zenith of the comprehension between animal and
human through the discourse of posthumanism:
The gaze called animal. . . ‘called animal,’ is important—
offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the
inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say
the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to
announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by
the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these
moments of nakedness, under the gaze of the animal,
everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for
the apocalypse. I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that
is to say the ultimate and first even of the end, the unveiling
and the verdict. (381-82)
The gaze of the animal, like in an apocalyptic world, strips bare
the remnants of what can be named “human” and redefines it
under the gaze of an animal. In Daniel25’s dystopian world, he
finally accepts and understands the part of himself that is human—
he is haunted by the gaze of this animal and everything that it
represents: mortality, love, and a deep affinity. Through reading
Daniel1’s history and his preoccupation with discontinuity,
Daniel25 realizes that he is the thing that is supposed to continue.
But as illumination strikes, Daniel25 chooses to reject the notion
of continuity. The death of Fox generates a fullness of
comprehension of the empty reality of immortality. Daniel25
embraces the distressing realization of an ultimate vulnerability,
causing the full awareness of his [post]human and apocalyptic
placement in time.
Georges Bataille writes, “Each being is distinct from all
others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have been
an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them.
He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another,
there is a gulf, a discontinuity” (12). It is Daniel25’s sense of this
The Possibility of an Island

shared mortality which finally allows him to experience freedom

within his [post]human and dystopian world. He acknowledges
this haunting and ancient truth through the death of his beloved
Fox. “Now I was alone. Night was falling on the lake, and my
solitude was definitive. Fox would never live again. . . I now
knew with certainty that I had known love, because I knew
suffering” (325). This intimate connection that Daniel25 feels with 133
this animal, this animal that shares his mortality, is what ties and
associates him to humanity long past and nearly forgotten.
Daniel25 laments the death of Fox: “As for me, I would continue,
 as much as was possible, my obscure existence as an improved
monkey, and my last regret would be. . . the death of Fox, the
only being worthy of survival I had had the chance to encounter;
134
for his gaze. . .” (336). Fox creates an axis point around which all
the ideas of human and [post]human revolve. In seeing Fox as a
fellow creature and something he loves, Daniel25 is finally able
to accept himself as something mortal, thus, “making him
human.” According to Cary Wolfe, posthumanism is an
nomad

“intensification of humanism” (xv). This realization liberates the

saga of Daniel. The epiphany of Daniel25: “Daniel1 lives again
in me, his body knows in mine; his existence actually prolongs
itself in me, far more than man ever dreamed of prolonging himself
through his descendants. My own life, however, I often think, is
far from the one he would have liked to live” (288). This is not
Daniel25’s rejection of being a product of [post]humanism—he is
human and it is the end. The suffering that causes Daniel25 to
prefer death over life, causes him to embrace his mortality.
Ironically, because Daniel25 embraces death, he becomes alive
as a human.
The novel ends with Daniel25 floating out among the
waves at sea. . . waiting for death and finitude to overtake him.
Daniel25 narrates, “We had first to follow mankind in its weakness,
its neuroses, its doubts; we had to make them entirely ours, in
order to go beyond them” (Houellebeq 125). The discourse he
represents is answered in totality through death. “A man can suffer
at the thought of not existing in the world like a wave lost among
many other waves. . .” (15) writes Bataille. Humanity seeks and
needs intimacy with other beings in order to experience
continuity. Daniel1 finds intimacy and continuity through the
fragility of sex. Daniel25, though unable to find continuity through
sex, found intimacy at the fragile point of death in the “sustaining
gaze” of his companion, a mere dog. The sting of fragility links
both of these acts. It is only through fragility that humanity, and
therefore humanism, is sustained.

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City

Lights Books, 1986. Print.
Houellebecq, Michel, and Gavin Bowd. The Possibility of an Island.
New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 2005. Print.
Ratnam, M. “Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John Mcdowell, Ian
Hacking and Cary Wolfe. Philosophy and Animal Life.” Mln Baltimore.
123.5 (2008): 1206-1209. Print.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Poesies. Librairie Generale Francaise, 1972. Print.
Thacker, Eugene. “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the
Discourse of the Posthuman.”Cultural Critique. (2003): 72-97.
Print.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of
The Possibility of an Island

Minnesota Press, 2010. Print.

135
 LAUREN GREENHALL
Lauren Greenhall is a double major in
comparative literature and Judaic
studies with a minor in creative writ-
ing, who, in addition, gets her period.

Mentor: Martha Searcey

THE RED TENT

AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF EMPOWERMENT WITHIN THE
FRAMEWORK OF NIDDAH

A nita Diamant’s historical fiction novel The Red Tent

reinterprets the later half of Genesis by granting the women of
the Bible an independent voice. While Genesis focuses on the experience
of the Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Diamant uses The
Red Tent to present the female perspective of these events, allowing the
reader to acknowledge the matriarchs as complex characters who have
individual stories aside from being wives and daughters. To
accomplish this, Diamant tells these narratives through the
perspective of Dinah, the lone daughter of Jacob and one of the
few women who did not marry into the patriarchal family, but
was born into it, making her a direct descendant of the line of
Abraham. Throughout the novel, Dinah recounts the details of
her life and the lives of her four mothers, spending a substantive
amount of time in an exclusively women’s space called “the red
tent.” The red tent functioned as a place of separation where
women stayed during their menstrual periods.
From a biological, physical standpoint menstrual blood
keeps human life continuously moving and evolving, giving
women the mechanism to produce life, and therefore families. In
The Red Tent, menstrual blood sustains a feminine discourse
inside a male-based narrative, a discourse that tends to have little
voice outside of feminist scholarship. By writing their stories,
Diamant calls for modern female readers to identify with Biblical
narratives, which gives women a chance to feel like there is a
place for them in a text that rarely grants women independent
The Red Tent

agency or personality.
While the fictional space of the red tent empowers the
women in Diamant’s world, it simultaneously reinforces Niddah,
the Biblical laws and regulations related to menstruation. These
laws are oppressive, for they imply that menstruants and therefore
all women are impure. By ignoring the sexist nature of Niddah,
Diamant is successful in portraying the separated, menstruating 137
woman as empowered and simultaneously conveys the
contradictory message that it is not necessary to question
oppressive rituals. In addition, the empowerment that results from
 this separation asserts modern feminist agency in a space that
would exist in order to sustain Jewish practices, not to challenge
the patriarchal system.
138
It is important to emphasize that the space of the red tent
did not exist in ancient near eastern culture. While there were
similar spaces in other ancient cultures most often referred to as
“menstrual huts,” these spaces would not have been practical for
the women Diamant writes about (Buckley et. al). As Charlotte
Fonrobert explains in her study of Biblical gender, Menstrual
nomad

Purity:
We can also observe that rabbinic literature does not
anywhere indicate or allude to a practice of women’s
public segregation. The literature maintains almost
uniformly a careful distinction between a practice of
ostracizing women or banishing them from the life of the
community…this would put the menstruant into an
adverse relationship to the community as a whole, and
the act of separating her from the community would
consequentially isolate her socially as a menstruant
woman. (18)
This separation also would not have been feasible, as there would
not have been enough resources in an ancient near eastern village
to sustain an extra tent merely for this purpose (Fonrobert 18).
While Diamant acknowledges that her novel is classified
as historical fiction, she never addresses the fictionality of the
red tent in the majority of her interviews or explanations of the
text1. Therefore, many readers are left to assume that these spaces
1
Some examples includeThe Copperfield Review’s “An Interview with Anita
Diamant”, Indie Bound’s “Anita Diamant”and/or any of the interviews on her
website AnitaDiamant.com.
did in fact exist. Because Diamant is a Jewish scholar, presumably
she added this space not because she did not do proper research
but rather in order to convey ideals of feminist empowerment.
However, by never claiming this space as fictitious, she places
20th century feminist ideals in a space that would not have
recognized these concepts.
Diamant did, however, construct the red tent as a barrier
between menstruating women and the rest of society in order for
women to be separated. This concept is derived from Niddah.
Niddah is found in two main sources: the Bible and the Talmud.
The first contians the priestly systems of purity and impurity,
and the second contians the list of prohibited sexual relationships
(Fonrobert 10). The word Niddah itself comes from the root hdn
meaning, “to depart, flee, wander,” an etymology that scholars
originally interpreted as being representative of the blood itself.
Eventually, however, the word came to connote the position of
the menstruant herself, as someone forced to depart, flee and
wander away from her husband. As Biblical scholar Jacob
The Red Tent

Milgrom claims, “Niddah came to refer not just to the menstrual

discharge but to the menstruant herself, for she too was
‘discharged’ and ‘excluded’ from her society” (744-745).
The original laws that pertain to Niddah are found in
Leviticus 15, the section of the Bible that contains a variety of
laws on discharges and emissions such as: regulations for a man
with an unclean discharge, an emission of semen that does not 139
enter a woman, menstruation, general discharges and men who
have sexual relations with menstruating women. The verses that
specifically refer to menstruating women, Leviticus 15:19-23, read:
140

(Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia 184).

The Hebrew translates:
nomad

19: When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood in

her body, she will be separated for seven days, and anyone who
touches her will be unclean till evening.
20: Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and
anything she sits on will be unclean.
21: Anyone who touches her bed will be unclean; they must wash
their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till
evening.
22: Anyone who touches anything she sits on will be unclean;
they must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will
be unclean till evening.
23: Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when
anyone touches it, they will be unclean till evening.
As these verses demonstrate, not only is woman unclean
because of her menstrual cycle, but she is taboo, for anyone who
comes into any type of contact with her is in effect made unclean
as well. Because of this, separation occurs in an attempt to have
women quarantine their impurity without contaminating men.
To reiterate, in the Ancient Near East women were not completely
separated from their societies. but nevertheless adhered to Niddah.
They accomplished this by not touching their husbands in any
form, including hand holding, avoiding surfaces where a man
might sit, and sleeping in a separate bed.
Men who have an unusual discharge adhere to rituals and
restrictions that to are identical to those of a menstruating woman
and therefore many argue that Niddah is not sexist. These acts
include polluting surfaces with their touch, being separated from
their spouses for seven days and immerging in the mikveh (or
ritual bath) afterwards. While this similarity does exist, there is
little distinction between the rituals surrounding a woman’s
normal, healthy menstrual cycle and an unusual male discharge.
By categorizing these two processes as similar, it implicitly states
that a woman by nature is unclean, while a man can only become
unclean.
Fonrobert claims that this idea of man becoming/women
being unclean can be found in the very wording of Leviticus 15.
Leviticus 15:2 and 15:19 state,

Speak to the children of Israel and say to them, “when any man
The Red Tent

has a discharge, his discharge being from his body, he is in the

status of impurity”.

When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood in her

body, she will be separated for seven days, and anyone who
touches her will be unclean until evening.
(Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia 183-184). 141

With these two verses side by side, it is clear that in the case of
men, the unclean substance is something unusual, a
contamination that is temporary. It can leave the body, yet it is
 not an inherent part of the body. For women, on the other hand,
the impurity is innate, something that is in her body and
inescapable.
142
This interpretation is also discussed in the Babylonian
Talmud in Mishnah Niddah 5:1, a text of rabbinical interpretations
of the Torah:
All women are in the status of impurity [when blood is] in
the outer room2, since it is said “her discharge being blood
nomad

in her body” (Lev. 15:19), whereas the man with an

uncommon discharge and the other with a seminal
emission are in the status of impurity only when their
impurity [appears] outside [their body].
While a menstrual cycle is a defining characteristic of womanhood
as well as a necessity for survival and general health, to have an
unusual discharge or a seminal emission that does not enter a
woman is not essential to being a man. Therefore, to group them
together under a system that calls for cleansing connotes that
something unfortunate and temporary for a man is analogous to
a defining characteristic of womanhood. Because of this, Jewish
women who practice Niddah are taught to internalize shame and
unease concerning the natural processes of their own bodies,
feeling that they are innately unclean.
Using Niddah to her advantage, Diamant takes these
instruments of oppression as a means to promote a female
narrative. In doing so, she reshapes the way women view their
menstrual cycles by reinforcing the importance of menstruation

2 The “outer room” is interpreted to mean outside of the vagina. This

idea of “woman as house” appears in many writings on menstruation.
to womanhood. Diamant not only makes this space a functional
one, but also explains to the reader the importance of this space
and the value of the menstrual cycle. The value of menstruation
to the women of the red tent is depicted in a variety of different
scenes, each giving the reader a sense of the importance of this
process to women. For example, When Esau’s daughter Tabea
does not undergo a proper ceremony after getting her period for
the first time, she is banished from the matriarch Rebecca’s tent
forever. After Rebecca screams, “You mean to tell me that her
blood was wasted? You shut her up alone like some animal...I
have no words for this abomination,” young Dinah becomes
confused, not understanding why Tabea’s act was grotesque
(Diamant 156). At this point, her mother sits her down and
explains:
The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to
women that is not known among men, and this is the secret
of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing
blood of the moon’s birth-to men, this is flux and
The Red Tent

distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and

consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them. In
the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where
days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses
through us, cleansing the body of last month’s death,
preparing the body to receive the new blood’s life, women
give thanks-for repose and restoration, for the knowledge 143

that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs
blood. (Diamant 158)
 In this way, Diamant highlights the benefits of an act the patriarchy
considers to be an impurity. Getting one’s period becomes
something sacred, and therefore women exclude the men from
144
their secret, leading them to believe that women have distaste for
menstruation as opposed to the true feelings of gratitude they
experience.
In addition, in The Red Tent vaginal blood is a substance
that belongs to women, one that should exist without the presence
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of men. Leah comments:

[Esau’s women] do not celebrate the first blood of those
who will bear life, nor do they return it to the earth. They
have set aside the Opening, which is the sacred business
of women, and permit men to display their daughters’
bloody sheets, as though even the pettiest baal would
require such a degradation in tribute. (Diamant 159)
In this passage, Leah is referring to an ancient Jewish practice
whereby the parents of the groom would display the bloody sheets
to the community after the wedding night. This was meant to
prove that the woman was truly a virgin. As read, Leah views
this act as vile, claiming that even the lowest of the gods would
never ask for such a deed.
The women of the red tent do not only disallow their
children’s sheets to be displayed, but also perform a pagan ritual
where they “break the lock of the womb” i.e. break the hymen of
young women before the wedding night. In this ritual fashioned
by Diamant, the women take Jacob’s terraphim, or idols, and place
one inside the vagina of the woman, allowing the woman to
experience the pain of having the hymen broken without the
pressure of a man. In this way, the women of the red tent show
compassion for virgins, allowing them to encounter this pain with
the support and understanding of other women who have
undergone the same experience. By having women take a woman’s
virginity as opposed to a man, Diamant reinterprets something
that is viewed as a male right in Judaism as a ritual of womanhood.
Similar to her creation of the physical space of the red tent,
Diamant creates a ritual in which women reclaim feminine power
in a male dominated sphere.
In the red tent, women form a community that educates
and empowers them independently of men. The reader
experiences this throughout the novel as Dinah travels from Haran
to Canaan, Shechem and finally Egypt. In the majority of these
settings, the red tent in that region defines her happiness and
sense of belonging. For example, when Dinah was a young child,
she would stay there in order to hear her four mothers’ tales,
The Red Tent

anecdotes about the outside world, as well as learn practical skills

such as threading wool. These stories and skills bonded women
together by creating a history and culture that was particular to
them. This is illustrated in a passage in which Dinah and her
brother Joseph trade knowledge they have learned from the
disparate traditions of men and women:
I told Joseph the story of Uttu the weaver. I told him the
145
tale of the great goddess Innana’s journey to the land of
the dead, and of her marriage to the shepherd king,
Dumuzi, whose love ensured an abundance of dates and
 wine and rain. There were the stories I heard in the red
tent, told and retold by my mothers and the occasional
trader’s wife who called the gods and goddesses by
146
unfamiliar names and sometimes supplied different
endings to ancient tales. (Diamant 81)
In response to this, Jacob tells her about the binding of Isaac, his
father’s God Yahweh, and other tales shared among men.
Because of these varied histories, the red tent creates a space where
women and men inherit a specific tradition and culture
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completely separate from the opposite sex. For that reason, women
have their own sets of oral tradition that are unpolluted by the
masculine voice. Fonrobert comments:
Women may mediate it psychologically through their self-
perception and their perception of other women as taught
to them by the culture in which they are raised. In spite of
the indirect male control, however, women’s spaces may
allow a consciousness of a collective gender identity to
emerge. (129)
This gender identity, however, can only be recognized inside of
the red tent. The minute that the women return to their husbands’
tents, the secrets of the tent are not spoken of and the women
again become property of their husbands as opposed to women
with a unique and valuable culture. Because this history and
culture can only flourish within closed spaces, the text indicates
that the female voice is subsumed in the male narrative.
This gendered identity, however, is one that Dinah looks
forward to, forming her self-identity most substantially within
the space of the red tent. Even when she travels to other places,
such as Mamre, it is only to enter the world of female identity
and to receive other sources of feminine wisdom inside her
grandmother’s tent. Throughout the course of her narrative, the
reader sees Dinah create different bonds with this space, each
reflecting not only her age but also the struggles and triumphs
that women face in the world of men.
When Dinah finally becomes a woman and begins her
menstrual cycle, she states, “Now I could pour out the wine and
make bread offerings at the new moon […]” (Diamant 171). For
Dinah, becoming a woman is not important because she can
become a bride, but because she gets to enter the world of
womanhood. To a woman in the ancient near east, the event of
most importance was supposed to be marriage, in which a woman
transferred herself as the property of one man (her father) to the
property of another (her husband). In this way, Dinah views her
menstrual cycle as unlimited access to the world of women as
opposed to entrance into the male social order. For Dinah,
independent womanhood is more valuable than belonging to a
The Red Tent

man.
The red tent was not only a space for menstruating women,
but also the site where women gave birth with the assistance of
midwives. Later in the novel Dinah becomes a midwife herself,
prolonging her desire for feminine bonding while assisting in the
struggles and triumphs of birth. Dinah remarks:
Until you are the woman on the bricks3, you have no idea 147
how death stands in the corner, ready to play his part.
Until you are the woman on the bricks, you do not know
the power that rises from other women—even strangers
 speaking an unknown tongue, invoking the names of
unfamiliar goddesses. (Diamant 224)
Becoming a midwife not only continues the theme of feminine
148
bonds, but also signifies the importance of childbirth to
womanhood. It is easy to focus on the objectionable aspects of
menstrual blood and ignore why women undergo this monthly
process in the first place. Menstruation not only sustains health,
but also provides the mechanism for new life. This is another
way in which the red tent functions as a space to promote
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Diamant’s independent agency.

Diamant’s novel is successful in conveying women’s
empowerment because her fictional historical intervention is
within an oppressive cultural context. This aspect of The Red
Tent relates to Saba Mahmood’s 2001 Politics of Piety, specifically
the essay “The Subject of Freedom”. In this essay, Mahmood
analyzes the women’s mosque movement, a faction of the Islamic
Revival in which women taught other women the Koran and spoke
about Islam inside of exclusively women’s spaces. When speaking
of traditional analysis, Mahmood argues:
Women’s active support for socioreligious movements that
sustain principles of female subordination poses a
dilemma for feminist analysts. On the one hand, women
are seen to assert their presence in previously male
dominated spheres while, on the other hand, the very
3
In ancient times, women would give birth standing on heated bricks.
These were used so that when they squatted down, gravity would as-
sist with the birth. Also, the woman in labor would be surrounded by
women who were close to her, supporting her on these bricks by chant-
ing and reminding her that they had all gone through birth, had sur-
vived, and that she would too.
 idioms they use to enter these arenas are grounded in
discourses that have historically secured their
subordination to male authority. In other words, women’s
subordination to feminine virtues…appear to be the
necessary condition for their enhanced public role in
religious and political life. (6)
She goes on to explain that while many feminist theorists search
for how women contribute and subvert their own domination,
she believes that it is important to not analyze these happenings
according to the resist/subvert dichotomy, but as acts that assert
their ethical agency. Citing Foucault, Mahmood writes, “Ethics
is a modality of power that ‘permits individuals to effect by their
own means or with the help of others, a certain number of
operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct,
and way of being’” (28).
Mahmood concludes that it is unreasonable to view the
women’s mosque movement as an act of female agency which
assists women in subverting male domination. This is because
The Red Tent

even if it does create empowerment among Muslim women, they

are not undergoing these rituals to upset oppressive power
structures, but to manifest their own agency as pious Muslim
women. While Diamant creates a space for women to express
their voices and find pride in womanhood, she is doing it inside
of a red tent, a structure that only exists because of the religious
practices of Judaism. Even in this fictional world, women would 149
not stay in the red tent in order to exercise defiance, they would
be going in order to embody practices that assert their agency as
religious Jews. The practice of going to the red tent may create a
 separate, positive order for women, yet to analyze this as a power
relation under the blanket of western feminist agency is to
undercut the realities of the historical setting of The Red Tent.
150
The red tent’s purpose would have been neither to empower nor
oppress women, but to grant them a space to exercise their
religious devotion.
The red tent grants women independent agency within
Diamant’s fictional world. However, while this space serves to
empower women, it simultaneously suggests that women should
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attempt to find positive meaning within oppressive practices

without directly challenging the system of oppression itself. In
addition, the all-women’s space that Diamant creates in The Red
Tent utilizes menstration as a tool for women to become
autonomous within the patriarchal system. Within this exclusively
women’s space, Diamant reinforces that menstruation is a healthy
process which shapes cultural identity and allows women to
express their voice autonomous of men. However, why should
women need a separate space in order to assert their agency?
Diamant’s historical intervention in The Red Tent reclaims
menstruation as an empowering practice. However, the text
simultaneously endorses separation, and therefore Niddah as an
acceptable, oppressive cultural practice. Because of this, The Red
Tent encourages women to overlook and ignore the repressive
implications of Niddah, reformulating them as a facet of Judaism
that bonds women. Diamant’s fictional historical intervention
places 20th century feminist ideals inside of an ancient religious
setting. It also asserts feminist agency inside of a space that would
exist purely for Jewish women to piously practice Judaism, not
to upset power dynamics or create positive feminine bonds. For
Diamant, this religious space is intended to create feminine bonds
and sustain a female cultural narrative, yet by tacitly accepting
Niddah, she condones the idea that women are inherently impure.

Works Cited

Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Anchor

Books, 1999. Print.
Babylonian Talmud. Ed. Epstein, Isidore. London: Soncino Press,
1935. Print.
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Ed. Alt, O. Eisfeldt, P. Kahle, and R.
Kittel. Stuttgart:Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1997. Print.
Brenner, Athalya, and Carole Fontaine. A Feminist Companion to
Reading the Bible. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.
Print.
Buckley, Thomas and Alma Gottleib. Blood Magic: The Anthropology
of Menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Print.
Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Print.
Fonrobert, Charlotte. Menstrual Purity. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000. Print.
Half of the Kingdom. Dir. Goldstein, Roushell and Francine E.
Zuckerman. Canada, 1989. DVD.
The Red Tent

Harrington, Hannah. The Purity Texts. New York: T&T Clark

International, 2004. Print.
Koren, Sharon Faye. “The Menstruant as “Other” in Medieval
Judaism and Christianity.” 17.17 (5769), 2009: 33-59. Print.
Mahmood, Saba. “The Subject of Freedom”. Politics of Piety.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.
Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction
and Commentary. Waterbury, Connecticut: John Bale Books
Company, 1991. Print.
Purity. Dir. Zuria, Anat and Amit Breuer. Israel, 2002. DVD.
151
nomad
 ANNA HARDIN
Anna Hardin is a Comparative
LIterature major minoring in Spanish
and Japanese. She would like to thank
her father for raising her a proud geek,
and for instilling within her the love
of science fiction that made this pa-
per possible.

Mentor: Sunayani Battacharya

FROM TYPESET TO HYPERTEXT:

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND AND THE
FUTURE OF THE BOOK

I t is difficult for even a great lover of books such as myself to describe

what it is about a printed book that is so alluring. Is it the cool, planar
surface of a thick hardcover, or the soft, worn edges of a favorite
paperback? Perhaps the heady scent of aged paper that greets me when I
walk into a used book store? It is difficult to say. But the veritable
explosion of digital texts in my lifetime has given me pause. There are
 both undeniable benefits and definite disadvantages that come
along with converting printed materials into a digital format,
which have been weighed by myself and others. Having
154
considered this issue, I would argue that it is important for one of
the primary forms of our civilization’s cultural sustenance to be
made available in a way that is relevant to the greatest number of
its people. But by which means and with what ramifications
should such a conversion take place? In order to develop an
answer to this question that goes beyond mere speculation, I will
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undertake an analysis of a work of fiction published fifty years

ago. I will use this novel to contend the following: because of the
increasingly digital climate of contemporary culture, it is
necessary for the book form to adapt to this changing atmosphere,
just as the protagonist of Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction
classic Stranger in a Strange Land must adapt his alien cultural
knowledge to human customs lest that knowledge be lost or
rendered inaccessible.
As a novel written in the early 1960s, Stranger in a Strange
Land has been situated historically by many critics among
countercultural works authored by contemporaries of Heinlein.
This is especially true of the novels of writers such as Jack Kerouac
and Tom Wolfe, men attempting to turn the idea of the American
dream on its head; the radical spirituality and social critiques
present in Heinlein’s work make it is easy to draw connections
between it and novels of the counterculture movement. Stranger
in a Strange Land has also been examined under the lens of
contemporary spirituality, cultural consumption, and even late
capitalism, and it has also been important for critics to consider
the turbulent Civil Rights atmosphere in America in the year of
its publication. But just as the thematic elements of this rich text
have been applied to the cultural climate of the time at which it
was written, I believe it remains relevant to apply them to
contemporary society. The abundance of cultural connotations
that exist in Stranger in a Strange Land, from spirituality to
prejudice to the substance of human nature, allow us to continue
to pull wisdom from its pages, and its commentary on the
challenges of cross cultural transmission of knowledge can be
readily applied to the issue of emerging digital texts. Within this
analysis, it is also possible to see the importance of iterating this
knowledge and transmitting it to future generations, and I fully
intend to develop that analysis throughout this essay.
Valentine Michael Smith, Heinlein’s interplanetary
protagonist, is raised under very unique circumstances. His
parents, along with a team of fellow scientists, depart on an
exploratory mission from Earth in order to better understand the
Martian civilization that has been discovered. Smith is conceived
Stranger in a Strange Land

during this mission, but tragically, the adult members of the crew
perish during the expedition. For this reason, he is brought up by
members of the Martian race and completely immersed in Martian
society and culture during his formative years. Having never
visited Earth, he knows nothing of humans. Therefore, when a
second expedition arrives twenty years after the first, the now-
adult Smith is overcome with curiosity. He returns to Earth on 155
this second ship as a both an ambassador and as a unique
specimen from Mars, but finds himself unable to understand or
relate to his fellow human beings. For example, at the outset of
 the novel, Smith is offered a glass of water by a nurse in the
hospital where he is being held. Because water is so rare on Mars,
offering water to another being is considered a solemn bonding
156
ritual, and so the nurse, Jill, becomes a member of Smith’s inner
circle, and, by extension, an important character in the story. Such
events occur frequently throughout the first half of the novel, as
Smith consistently misinterprets normal human social
interactions.
So, what does Smith’s fictional story have to do with the
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future of the physical book? As it turns out, there is much we can

learn from Smith’s predicament. Although he may not understand
the intended purpose of many human interactions, Smith is
uniquely qualified to transmit Martian culture to humans because
he is a human being himself. He has the unique perspective of
one who was raised Martian, but who is capable of experiencing
life in the same way that humans do, at least biologically. Those
of us living in contemporary society occupy a comparable
position. The digital age has come about in our lifetimes, meaning
that we were alive at a time when the Internet was not most
people’s source of information. We have a dual perspective, just
as Smith does. We have witnessed the birth of the widespread
technological access that is available in Western society today,
but can still identify with physical books as a source of knowledge
and cultural understanding. If there is anyone qualified to predict
the form that future information will take and adapt current and
past knowledge to that format, it is those of us born in the early
1990s or before. We have experienced both the print and the digital
world, and have established a comfortable relationship with both.
 The first example of this dual perspective that I would
like to bring forward from the text, though it may seem far removed
from the issue at hand, is that of Smith’s inability to understand
the custom of human sexual encounters. On Mars, the act of sex
is not a pleasurable one, and would never be engaged in for
purposes other than procreation. However, as Smith spends more
time on Earth, it becomes clear that sex is a very important social
ritual among humans. Likewise, in our society, it has become
abundantly clear that digital media is an important means of
transmitting culture, and must be considered and included in
any plans we make for the future. It is important for us to
determine what cultural elements will be most important to digital
generations, so that we may use these observations to best adapt
our cultural knowledge into a form to which future societies will
be receptive. In his ruminations about how best to present Martian
ideology to a human audience, Smith acknowledges that sex must
be incorporated, and so it is when at last he discovers the method
of cultural transmission he has been searching for. Smith founds
Stranger in a Strange Land

the Church of All Worlds, and one element of this church is

encouraged sexual freedom among its members. This serves as a
point of reference through which Smith’s followers can
understand the foreign way in which Martians consider
philosophy; that is, as a unified whole which is mentally linked.
Because they are both comfortable and familiar with their
understanding of sex, Smith uses this as a gateway to mentally 157
link his followers and bring them together into a unified group.
By using sex as a tool to reach his fellow humans, it
becomes much easier for Smith to find common ground in his
 teaching of Martian culture. One character, Ben, is particularly
resistant to joining the body of Smith’s church. It is only by having
sex with one of the church’s high priestesses that his eyes are
158
opened to the potential of the “growing closer” that comes from
ritualized sexual experiences in the Church of All Worlds. From
there, his resistance to Smith’s teachings breaks down, and it
becomes easy for Smith to teach him the elements essential to
the practice and understanding of Martian “spirituality”. These
elements include the Martian language and its inability to convey
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falsehoods, the discipline of patience (intoned by members of

the church through the phrase “waiting is”), the benefits of ritual
consumption of the dead, and even levitation and other telepathic
abilities, which require an intense awareness of the world around
oneself. It is crucial that we find a similar point of reference for
digital generations, so that they might understand elements of
our culture more easily. As stated previously, because those of us
alive today are able to understand both digital and non-digital
culture, we are in a unique position to find such a reference point.
Because of their increasing popularity, emerging electronic books
and hypertext may help us to match Smith’s success in increasing
receptivity to the most important elements of our cultural
understanding.
Like Smith, as we begin to see the electronic forms the
book will take in the future (e.g. Amazon.com’s Kindle), it is
important to observe society’s receptivity to various electronic
media and to incorporate the elements that garner the most
enthusiastic responses into future electronic transmissions of
culture. For example, in his article “Ekphrasis, virtual reality,
and the future of writing,” Professor Jay David Bolter mentions
the tendency of contemporary newspapers and television news
broadcasts to split up screens into multiple portions when
reporting stories, displaying a website or hypertext with
interactive elements in the vein of clickable links, embedded
video, and Twitter feeds (Nunberg 261). News media have
assumed this format in response to viewer and reader demand
for a multi-faceted presentation of news, where changing graphics
and/or a diverse display provide the type of information that the
audience is interested in. An increased focus of news media on
their websites and online content further emphasizes that
hypertext, a form of electronic text that can provide links to
outside sources and does not require sequential reading, is the
format that readers have come to expect. Printed books, on the
other hand, can only sensibly be read in sequential order and
inconveniently require that the reader flip pages or switch to an
entirely different text in order to access referenced content
(Bornstein 53). Therefore, printed books simply cannot compete
Stranger in a Strange Land

with the interactivity of hypertext. This is an area in which

hypertext holds an obvious advantage over printed materials.
Returning to Stranger in a Strange Land, Smith’s spiritual
philosophy holds an advantage similar to that of hypertext over
the printed book. By breaking down the traditional hierarchy of
organized religions, this philosophy offers a level of involvement
that traditional churches are unable to achieve. As a prominent 159
member of Smith’s church explains it, “We’re not trying to get
people to have faith, what we offer is not faith but truth – truth
they can check” (Heinlein 347). Smith achieves great success in
 recruiting followers because they feel centrally involved in the
life of their church. No individual feels as though they are one
among a multitude of saved souls passively receiving information
160
from some lofty authority. They are involved in a group effort to
make sense of the world they inhabit, and their beliefs and what
they accept to be true are formed from the combined dialogue of
all the group members’ voices. Solipsistic as it may be, digital
media seem to be trending in a similar manner. In order to appeal
to consumers of these media, it is important to provide them with
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a sense of being central to cultural dialogue. Like the members of

Smith’s church, consumers of digital culture desire not only
reception of but engagement with texts, something that is lacking
from traditional printed books. It is logical, then, to construct a
means of cultural transmission which values the input of
individuals consuming it.
As we consider the best way to create such a social
environment, it would be pertinent to turn to the model of the
omnipotent “Old Ones” of Heinlein’s Martian race; that is,
Martians who have “discorporated,” or left their physical bodies,
the closest idea Martians have to death. Although they have lost
their physical form, they remain as a collective of telepathic voices
that provide wisdom to corporeal Martians. Their areas of
expertise range from Smith’s expedition to Earth to art: “The
discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly to
send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet,
then turned attention back to more serious matters...Was it a new
sort of art? Could more such pieces be produced by surprise
discorporations of artists while they were working?” (Heinlein
92). They also hold authority in matters of force and conquest:
“The Martian race had encountered the people of the fifth planet,
grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins
were all that remained” (93). The phrase “grokked them
completely” summarizes the role of the Old Ones well. The word
“grok,” which will be discussed in more detail later, means
roughly “to understand.” It is their responsibility, therefore, to
acquire a complete understanding of issues facing Martians and
to judge, take action, and provide knowledge accordingly.
A common concern about the digitalization of culture,
expressed by French intellectual Régis Debray, is that too many
voices will have the ability to exert their influence over digital
texts, and that this will cause the texts themselves to be stripped
of their authority (Nunberg 145). Such a conflict has played out
in the debate over the legitimacy over Wikipedia entries, which
may be altered by any registered user. A similar situation is
encountered in the overwhelming abundance of comments left
by users on YouTube videos or blog posts. However, if we follow
Stranger in a Strange Land

the example of Heinlein’s Old Ones, the presence of a multiplicity

of voices will, in fact, prove beneficial. By making texts available
to a global audience via the Internet, collaborators can come
forward who would otherwise be excluded from the writing
process.
Though it is true that not every online user can be relied
upon as a legitimate source of information, the critical eye of a 161
wide pool of trustworthy users would make errors in hypertext
much more unlikely even than in the case of a printed version of
a book or document. In fact, it is possible for the book to be seen
 as fundamentally unsound because it is so finite (Ayers 767),
whereas hypertext is in a constant state of revision and evolution
in reaction to the most current information available (McGann
162
385). Thus Wikipedia articles that have been falsified or contain
out-of-date information are flagged and almost immediately
revised by its community of editors, and wildly outrageous
comments can be reported and/or removed from blogs and online
videos. In the same way, the Old Ones in Stranger in a Strange
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Land work as a collective whole in order to make decisions and

proclaim truths that have been considered from every viewpoint.
Their collective advice therefore offers much more wisdom than
any one individual could provide.
Another device employed by Heinlein that supports the
argument for an electronic group collective is the word “grok.”
The literal Martian translation would be “to drink,” but a
conceptual definition would be something more like “to
understand in full/in every aspect.” It is only truly achieved by
Smith and other characters in the novel once they have been
receptive to multiple viewpoints and have considered an issue
from every angle. Without consulting a great number of people
outside themselves, it would be impossible for each individual
to appraise every possible positive or negative aspect of a concept
or action. This consultation is very important to Smith’s decision
making process and influences his and his companions’ choices.
For example, if Smith or one of his followers “groks” that a
person’s behavior is malicious or morally unjust, they simply
cause them to disappear. Because this action causes the wrongdoer
to cease to exist, it is not a decision that should be made lightly,
and so the consequences must be understood in full before it is
carried out. Group consensus is therefore very important in such
decisions.
Though matters of culture may not be a matter of life and
death, if we truly wish to “grok” in the way that Heinlein’s
characters do, we should make use of the Internet and electronic
communication as a means of sharing thoughts on, and through
texts. If the outcome of Stranger in a Strange Land is any
indication, consultation of such a collective mutually benefits all
of its members by contributing to their enlightenment and
ensuring they are fully informed on the issues they are
considering. Further, collective dialogue stimulates interest in
cultural matters, and therefore it becomes much more likely that
culture as we know it now will continue to be discussed and be
transmitted to future generations. This will enable our progeny
to “grok” historical elements of our culture just as Smith’s
followers “grok” Martian culture by allowing them to interact
Stranger in a Strange Land

directly with works that had previously been made up of

impenetrable blocks of text. For instance, the emergence of online
forums allows not only commentary on cultural products and
events, but promotes active, real time dialogue between users
who would otherwise be unable to communicate due to
geographical distance. The ease of communication that forums
and other online spaces provide encourages the continuation of 163
cultural dialogue. In addition, the likelihood that items such as
digital texts will remain in discourse will increase, and therefore
they will continue to be circulated.
 In the novel, Smith experiences great difficulty expressing
Martian ideology in a way that humans are able to comprehend.
After years of struggling, he at last realizes that religion is the
164
human concept that most closely mirrors what he is attempting
to intimate. In this respect, in our shift from printed to digital
culture, we have an advantage over Smith; we can already see
what form of culture will be accepted by the culture we are
attempting to reach. We already know that electronic media and
texts that incorporate interactivity will become the best way to
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transmit our existing cultural knowledge. But like Smith, we have

to determine the best way to transfer our current knowledge into
this new form. His solution is to create a religion that functions
as a group collective, the way the Martian race does, and it would
be wise for us to form a similar, though secular, collective.
This collective structure enables the members of Smith’s
church to interact in such a way that no one person holds any
more importance than any other. All members are invited and
encouraged to engage in the group consciousness. This engages
them in a way that would not be possible in the typical hierarchical
structure that religious institutions employ. Similarly, allowing
online users who view themselves as far removed from original
authors to engage in texts in a critical way will actively engage
them in cultural dialogue (Scholes 71). This widespread
engagement with and discourse about texts not only has the benefit
of a wider critical audience discussed previously, but will also
generate new interest in texts traditionally seen as
unapproachable. The information presented in books can only
remain relevant if there is someone who cares to read it, and
allowing a wider pool of users to contribute to critical dialogue
through electronic and online publication will make it much easier
for digital generations to maintain an interest in such matters.
With continued interest, a higher demand for these texts will be
created, and, ideally, their circulation will continue.
There is also a real potential for the creation of new cultural
artifacts from electronic sources. With the removal of the physical
limitations of printing one’s work, possibilities for publication
open up tremendously for readers, especially in regards to works
that comment upon previous publications. Every individual has
a unique perspective and contribution to make to the group
collective proposed previously, and the inclusion of these diverse
voices in cultural dialogues can only broaden the horizons of the
community as a whole. As Robert Boenig observes in his essay
“Nicholas’s Psaltery,” recorded texts are reflections of the ways
in which their authors see the world (Boenig 96). With the
increased production of texts via electronic mediums, this
profusion of voices will reach a wider audience, and will
Stranger in a Strange Land

contribute greatly to cultural knowledge as a whole. If everyday

people feel as though they are able to comment on existing works
or contribute to existing canon, they will be better able to relate
to these texts and to provide interpretations that reach wider
audiences, drawing them into cultural dialogues as well. Not every
work will be of exceptional quality, of course, but if people are
engaging with texts, the texts retain their cultural relevance, and 165
continue to sustain not only the cultural knowledge they provide,
but the inspiration and cultural context from which new texts
are created.
 Despite popular interest in digital texts as a means of
transmitting culture, there exists a perception that online texts
are inherently inferior to printed materials. A similar conflict
166
arises in Stranger in a Strange Land, as Smith’s church is seen as
an inferior imitation by those belonging to traditional human
churches. It is not a legitimate religion, as they see it, but a
blasphemous mockery. For his supposed transgression against
the sanctity of religious institutions, Smith is martyred at the
conclusion of the story. He is stoned to death by an enraged mob,
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who object to his use of phrases such as “Thou art God”. What
Smith has done is taken the concept of evangelical religious
practices and applied it to his own philosophy. In addition, he
takes the idea of an all-knowing creator and applies it to the unified
body of the members of his church. This adaptation is perceived
as perversion by members of traditional Christian congregations,
and they see in Smith’s church a contempt for religion as they
know and respect it. Heinlein uses this scene to provide
commentary on the violent resistance to change that human beings
exhibit, and indeed the malevolence of this angry crowd is as
frightening as it is disturbing.
Though they are not known to exhibit acts of violence,
similar outraged claims and resistance to change are heard from
proponents of printed texts. But there was a point in time, as
Provost of Georgetown University James J. O’Donnell points out,
where printed texts were considered suspect as well (Nunberg
41). Because Gutenberg’s printing press made books so widely
available in such mass quantities, they were viewed as of a lesser
caliber than a handwritten edition. The same conflict has emerged
today. Just as leather and vellum were seen as having greater
permanence than a paper edition, printed materials are seen as
more veritable than electronic texts. But the ease with which the
information contained in books becomes obsolete, coupled with
the fact that the paper they are printed on has a shelf life of only
200 years (Nunberg 43-44), makes suspicion of electronic texts
unfounded. A fear of change resulted in the disastrous loss of
Smith’s life in Stranger in a Strange Land; we could face a similar
loss of valuable information if we do not continue efforts to ensure
current knowledge is available in electronic forms that can be
stored, backed up, converted, and therefore shared among
countless generations without fear of deteriorating paper. If an
original printed book or document is allowed to disintegrate
without being saved in another format, there will be no text to
refer back to. Any discussion about the cultural information it
provided will be nothing more than hearsay, and so that source
of knowledge will be disregarded and lost permanently.
Of course, there are concerns about the corruption of
Stranger in a Strange Land

electronic data as well. The popularity of digital formats is

extremely volatile, changing and renewing as technology does
every few months. Take, for instance, Apple’s iPod, which has
popularized mp3 devices and greatly reduced the market for CDs.
Further, it is impossible to know if the data forms we use now
will even be readable with future technology. Just because a digital
copy has been produced does not mean it will be accessible 167
indefinitely; digital formats are also subject, in their own way, to
decay, with a typical DVD having a shelf life of only 100 to 200
years in perfect storage conditions (Bornstein 45). This loss of
 access is a lesson that Smith’s followers learn well: they have to
face the reality of life without their primary source of knowledge,
because Smith is violently removed from the form in which they
168
have access to his mind and cogitations. But a record of his
knowledge and understanding remains in his collective following,
because of the telepathic link the group shares. Electronic copies
of texts should function in a similar way. New versions of texts
need to be frequently presented in new formats, before the old
formats become unreadable, just as new generations of Smith’s
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followers must adopt his Martian teachings before older followers

discorporate. This is comparable to the way old books must be
printed in new versions before their pages crumble and their ink
fades to a state of illegibility.
There is no need for society to have a fear of technology in
relation to publication. The inclusion of computers has already
made the jobs of publishing houses easier and more efficient.
Because of the integration of technology into the publishing world,
from Gutenberg’s press to modern software, books have become
available to an increasingly wide audience (Nunberg 299). The
more easily accessible a text becomes, the more people will be
able to read it. With further advances in technology, especially
electronic texts, books and the knowledge they contain will
continue to increase the size of their audience. But this is not to
say that physical books will cease to exist, or that there will be no
room for them in a digital era. It is better to think of electronic
texts as University of California Berkeley history professor Carla
Hesse does, as a new mode of communication that can exist
alongside traditional printed books (Nunberg 32). This can already
be seen with the e-books that have exploded in popularity in the
last several years. While there are those such as author E. Annie
Proulx who protest that the high aesthetic value of a page in
relation to a “twitchy little screen” will prevent the mass
digitization of books (9), the ease with which portable e-readers
such as Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Amazon.com’s Kindle can
be transported by readers and the convenience of having access
to dozens of volumes on one device spreads the appeal of reading
to a wider audience.
Although it is impossible for anyone to predict the future,
it is clear that the role of the book is changing, and will continue
to change with the advance of technology. Books themselves will
always have advocates, from the eager collector to the passionate
scholar, and as has been discussed are in no danger of disappearing
altogether. But the tastes of contemporary society have certainly
acclimated themselves to a diet of digital culture, and the book
form is no longer the foremost embodiment of cultural sustenance.
In order to maintain the historical and cultural value of books
that currently fill library shelves, we must digitize them to cater Stranger in a Strange Land

to modern society’s methods of taking in information. While it

may not be an aesthetically or sentimentally appealing notion to
those of us who love books as they currently exist, it is a logical
one from the standpoint of cultural transmission. The
technological age is already upon us; returning to a print-dominant
culture is no longer an option, if ever it was. Like Smith, we must
do our best to accommodate the cultural needs of a society that
will share information in a way fundamentally different than our 169
own. And like Smith, we have our inherent humanity in common
with this future society that will allow us to adapt our knowledge
to a form they will gladly accept and pass on.
 Works Cited

Ayers, David. “Materialism and the Book.” Poetics Today 24.4

2003: 759-780. Project Muse. Web. 27 Jan. 2011.
Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.
Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Ace
Books, 1987. Print.
Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural
Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Ed. Robert
Boenig and Kathleen Davis. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell
University Press; London: Associated University Presses,
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2000. Print.
McGann, Jerome. “Radiant Textuality.” Victorian Studies 39.3
(Spring 1996): 379-392. Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Jan.
2011.
Scholes, Robert. “Textuality: Power and Pleasure.” English Education
19.2 (1987): 69-82. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2011.
The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996. Print.
 JOSHUA ZIRL
Jozhua Zirl is a sophomore English
major who stumbled into this com-
parative literature program after be-
ing shown the secret handshake by a
favorite professor. His extensive
knowledge and love for the
hardboiled and noir genres have been
of absolutely no help in the writing of
this paper.

Mentor: Jacob Barto

FLICKERING REALITY:
ILLUMINATING DELUSIONAL SELF-SUSTAINMENT USING
NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE

T he seemingly harmless and essential question of what sustains a

person is often the catalyst for fierce debate. Debaters, who are
firmly convinced of a particular answer, rally together with like-minded
colleagues to form the different factions which argue over which single
reply is the most important. From these many groups, a few opinions
have gained greater respect than others. Often, the realist will answer
 shelter; the romantic, love; the politician, social stability; and the
nihilist, that there is no answer. Rarer is the passing psychoanalyst
or philosopher that suggests delusion as an important aspect in
172
the sustenance of a person. While this interpretation may seem
counter-intuitive, it is equally, if not more, valid than any of the
others. Delusions can help a person feel at home anywhere,
persevere through hard times, and find a place in society by giving
him a sense of purpose, causing him to think he has the answer.
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The major flaw with delusion is that, if left uncontrolled, it can

increase a person’s difficulty in differentiating between internal
and external realities. In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire,
the ability of the characters to control their respective delusions
is directly proportional to the effectiveness of their self-
preservation. The better each person is at maintaining his
delusions, the longer he lives. Delusion, or illusion, as the two
terms will be synonymous in this context, is a false and incredibly
persistent belief of sometimes overwhelming conviction that is
not substantiated by sensory evidence (Shengold 29).
Though there are many classifications of delusion, the
characters in Pale Fire exhibit three distinct types as identified
by Dr. Leonard Shengold, a Freudian psychoanalyst and clinical
professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical School,
in his book Delusions of Everyday Life. Aspects of narcissistic
delusions, malignant envy and paranoid feelings are all exhibited
in various ways by the characters in the novel and act as coping
mechanisms for the difficulties that they face.
 Though Nabokov would certainly not appreciate this
perspective on his work, having said, “Freudism and all it has
tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appears to
me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on
themselves and on others” (Strong Opinions 24), the
characteristics of these three Freudian delusions strongly resemble
those evinced by Nabokov’s characters. However, I seek to go
beyond a mere textual diagnosis of the different psychotic traits.
By analyzing both the clinical and philosophical components of
these fictional characters, it becomes possible to trace the
characters’ shared psychological tendencies, gauge their
representational significance, and determine the role language
and literature have on the characters’ delusions. It is through
Nabokov’s revelations of the different types and intensities of
delusion that Pale Fire, which begins as a seemingly
straightforward story, quickly increases in complexity.
Pale Fire is an experimental novel that is, ostensibly,
centered around a 999-line poem of the same name written by
Pale Fire

professor and poet John Shade. Providing a foreword and

extensive commentary for the poem is John’s friend and fellow
professor, Charles Kinbote. The brief prologue hints at Kinbote’s
eccentricity and his obsession with himself, John and Zembla, a
fictive foreign country resembling Russia.
The poem, on the other hand, is John Shade’s deeply
personal and emotional autobiography that also includes brief 173
biographies of his wife, Sybil, and their only child, Hazel.
Though Sybil is presented as loving and supportive, Hazel is
identified as insecure and unstable. John laments that his daughter
 was not gifted with an attractive appearance or self-confidence,
and thus was always a social outcast despite her impressive
intellect. These characteristics are what make Hazel the most
174
volatile and short-lived character in the novel. Though she is
aware of her social ineptness and poor looks, she utilizes
narcissistic delusions in order to make these disadvantages seem
insignificant. Narcissistic delusions can take many forms, but
the purpose is always the same: to increase one’s sense of self-
importance, usually at the cost of respect for others. Hazel has
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three distinct narcissistic delusions that she uses to shelter herself

from the harsh truths of her life.
The first, as Dr. Shengold describes, is “that no one really
counts outside the family” (Shengold 40). Since Hazel does not
have any friends, her parents comprise her entire world. John
recognizes this in his poem, saying that Hazel made her nuclear
family “a triptych or a three-act play / In which portrayed events
forever stay. / I think she always nursed a small mad hope” (Pale
Fire 46). By building her parents up as the only people whose
opinions matter, Hazel trivializes the rest of society in order to
change her perception of herself from an outcast to an idol. This
excerpt also reveals the second delusion that Hazel holds. By
believing that things would never change, Hazel denies her own
and, more importantly in this situation, her parents’ mortality.
This refusal to accept one’s mortality is a trait that she shares
with her father, but, unfortunately, she does not use it as effectively
as he does. In this instance, her inability to accept the possibility
of death is merely a manifestation of her dependency on her
parents.
 Unlike her first two narcissistic delusions, Hazel’s third is
an elaborate production stemming from her fabricated
supernatural encounters. As a child, she pretended to haunt her
home as the ghost of her aunt by secretly moving furniture or
other inanimate objects and feigning ignorance when asked if
she had done it. Though her parents coerced her into giving up
the ghost, as it were, she tries to convince them of another
paranormal confrontation that she experienced during an
investigation of an old and supposedly haunted barn for her
college newspaper. Hazel uses these events to reinforce within
herself the idea that she is special and someone to be envied in
spite of her looks and reclusiveness. When she tries to show her
parents this new ghost, however, they refuse to play along.
Their refusal is doubly devastating for Hazel. Not only is
her delusion of uniqueness shattered, but the forceful
disillusionment is perpetrated by her parents, the only two people
she respects. Thus, the simultaneous rejection by her heroes and
collapse of her delusions mean that she is no longer able to take
Pale Fire

solace in either of her fantasies. Shortly after this incident, the

reality of Hazel’s situation overwhelms her and she loses the will
to continue living, which culminates in her suicide. Hazel’s
demise deeply affects John and darkens the tone of the rest of his
poem.
However, once the poem concludes and the commentary
begins, quite a different story emerges. While Kinbote’s 175
commentary pretends to analyze and clarify certain lines of John
Shade’s poem, the annotations gradually reveal themselves to be
an attempt to adapt John’s autobiography into Kinbote’s own. At
 first, Kinbote presents himself as a good friend of John’s despite
his wife Sybil’s best efforts to keep them apart, but as Kinbote
starts divulging more about himself and his relationship with the
176
Shades, cracks in his narrative begin to show. Kinbote insists
that the stories he told John about Charles Xavier, the current
king of Zembla, who fled the country due to a coup, were the
impetus for the poem. Eventually, Kinbote’s impossibly detailed
and increasingly lengthy digressions about King Charles and his
escape expose Kinbote’s true identity as the king himself.
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Halfway through the commentary, Kinbote introduces

Gradus, an incompetent Zemblan assassin determined to kill the
ousted king. The specifics of Gradus’ search and eventual success
in catching up to his target are recounted by Kinbote, again with
suspiciously intimate details that suggest an inside knowledge.
Kinbote characterizes Gradus as having a deep-seated malignant
envy, or hate for people whom he sees as having something that
he wants. He is a man of very low intelligence who lacks the
ability to comprehend the distribution of power, and “called
unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his understanding”
(Pale Fire 152). As Freud said, “The king or chief arouses envy
on account of his privileges: everyone, perhaps, would like to be
a king” (Freud 33). This certainly explains why King Charles,
who is above all others in rank and power, is the person that
Gradus loathes most. This hatred is the reason that Gradus’
malignant envy is able to sustain him with a much greater degree
of success than Hazel managed to achieve with her narcissism.
While Hazel was forced to rely on other people to help her
maintain her delusions, Gradus has no such requirement. He
only needs someone to act as prey for his malicious obsession,
and for a man of his low station and intelligence, enviable targets
are plentiful. In spite of his many setbacks and dead ends, Gradus’
jealousy of King Charles is what motivates him to pursue his
purpose relentlessly.
In the climax of the novel, Gradus, armed with a pistol,
confronts Kinbote while he is with John. Gradus opens fire and
kills John, despite Kinbote’s best efforts to shield him. Gradus is
then overpowered and detained until the police arrive. After
assessing the situation, the police file a report identifying Gradus
as Jack Grey, an escaped patient of a mental institution who
mistook John Shade for the judge that sent him away. Kinbote, of
course, dismisses this version of events as a cover-up.
In the ensuing panic and grief over John’s murder, Kinbote
secures the rights to publish Pale Fire from Sybil. The novel
ends with Kinbote pondering his next action and suggesting that
he might find another town and start the whole process over again.
Even after the book ends, Kinbote’s delusions make it is impossible
Pale Fire

to discern the truth that lies beneath his words.

Not only does Kinbote incorporate both narcissistic
delusion and malignant envy into his personality, he also goes
one step further and adds paranoid delusions to his already
considerable list of psychotic traits. This is not entirely surprising,
however, as Dr. Shengold states, “Narcissism, envy, paranoid
mechanisms often occur together and, indeed, are most often 177
blended together” (Shengold 99). This tendency for delusion to
build on itself and branch out is an important characteristic. While
multiple delusions can reinforce each other and act in tandem to
 shelter a person from a reality that he does not want to face, it is
easy for the delusions to propagate and obscure his external reality
entirely, as they do in Kinbote’s case.
178
The strongest delusions that Kinbote has are
narcissistic. They drive him to steal John’s autobiographical poem
and turn it into what Kinbote calls “‘my’ poem” (Pale
Fire 182). The commentary reveals his self-obsession to be truly
all-consuming. Even on the most superficial level Kinbote is
unable, or perhaps refuses, to identify with Shade’s subject matter,
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as evidenced by his interpretation of Shade’s admission of having

“never bounced a ball or swung a bat” (117) as referring to playing
soccer and cricket. Kinbote’s inability to think of anything in
terms of how it relates to anyone besides himself leads to some
incredibly egregious statements. In regards to the lengthy section
of John’s poem in which he talks about Hazel, Kinbote is critical
and dismissive, saying that it is “maybe a little too complete,
architectonically, since the reader cannot help feeling that it has
been expanded and elaborated to the detriment of certain other
richer and rarer matters ousted by it” (164). He further proves
that his delusions have overwritten his ability to empathize when
he says, ”What I would not have given for the poet’s suffering
another heart attack [...] leading to my being called over to their
house” (96). It is this need to be the center of attention at all
times that brings about his malignant envy.
Dr. Shengold states, “The feeling of having been deprived
of what was promised – and by someone else […] are largely
those of malignant envy” (Shengold 65). The jealousy and
resentment Kinbote expresses for Hazel because of her
prominence in her father’s poem is one such instance. However,
the prime target for Kinbote’s envy is Sybil, because she has what
he does not: control over John. There is no mention of Sybil in
Kinbote’s commentary that is not either connected to a wrong
that he perceives her having committed against him or to a slight
against her character. This hatred of Sybil also has close ties with
his persecution complex.
Kinbote’s paranoid delusion is a natural extension of his
malignant envy. Since Sybil occupies the position that he covets,
he views her as an antagonist. He constantly charges her with
the crime of placing herself between himself and John and
preventing them from speaking. While these accusations are not
entirely unwarranted, he often blames her for actions for which
John is solely responsible. The most overt example of this is when
he claims, “She made [John] tone down or remove from his Fair
Copy everything connected with the magnificent Zemblan theme”
(Pale Fire 91). Kinbote’s reliance on and obsession with John do
not allow him to admit that the two of them are not as close as
Pale Fire

Kinbote believes. Therefore, any faults that Kinbote sees in John

are transferred to Sybil in order to maintain the delusion of John’s
poetic perfection. However, Kinbote’s delusions of persecution
are not limited to John’s family alone.
The creation of the back story for Jack Grey as Gradus the
assassin is a combination of both narcissistic and paranoid
delusions. Because Kinbote could not cope with the idea that he 179
was not the target of the attack, he created a paranoid delusion in
which he was. Despite his best efforts, though, Kinbote’s delusions
begin to wane in the face of honesty.
 In the latter half of the novel, Kinbote admits with
increasing frequency that his beliefs are delusions, though they
come across as vertical splits in his reasoning, which occur when
180
an isolated and sterile part of one’s brain recognizes that one is
not seeing reality, but lacks any ability to effect or integrate with
the delusional part (Shengold 16). While Kinbote cannot reconcile
his delusions with reality through these vertical splits, their
increasing frequency and intensity suggest a gradual collapse of
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his delusions.
This deterioration begins when he admits that one of the
earlier, tenuous ties he made between John’s poem and Zembla is
“on the brink of falsification” (Pale Fire 228). By questioning his
strongest delusion, he weakens his entire belief system and begins
a snowball effect that quickly smashes through multiple layers of
his constructed reality. Shortly after this acknowledgement,
Kinbote bitterly examines the fact that he was only invited to
dine with the Shades three times during their friendship and was
almost completely ignored each time. Then, Kinbote relates a
story in which he, in jest, adds to a discussion about a delusional
man, to whom Shade refers as “a fellow poet,” by ironically saying,
“We all are, in a sense, poets” (238).
Kinbote does attempt to rally his beliefs one final time
near the end of the novel. In order to convince both his audience
and himself of the validity of his story, he defends his delusions
by preempting future detractors’ arguments against the accuracy
of his account. His delusions of persecution again show through
as he claims that people will say that events happened differently
from his version, such as his assurance that Sybil will deny that
some of the variations of John’s poem are accurate (297).
However, in the concluding paragraph of the novel,
Kinbote borders on disillusionment. He explores the idea of
staging a play based on “a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary
king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a
distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of
fire” (301). Though it is arguable as to whether his tone is serious
or playful, the fact that he refers to Gradus as wanting to kill a
king, rather than Shade, and uses his wishful adjective of
“distinguished” for Shade, a minor poet, demonstrates one final
vertical split in his reasoning in which he both recognizes yet
still retains his delusions.
Unfortunately, while Kinbote does live to complete his
commentary of Pale Fire, his life beyond the pages of the book is
bleak at best. Since many of his delusions required the presence
of John Shade as a screen for him to project them on, John’s murder
means the death of Kinbote’s delusions as well. At certain points
Pale Fire

in the novel, Kinbote strongly defends the act of suicide and hints
at committing the act himself. Shortly after Kinbote visits Gradus,
or Jack Grey, in the insane asylum to which he has been returned,
Gradus commits suicide with a razor. Kinbote claims that “he
died, not so much because having played his part in the story he
saw no point in existing any longer, but because he could not live
down this last crowning botch [of killing the wrong man]” (Pale 181
Fire 299).
While the latter part of Kinbote’s reasoning is just another
example of his ever-present narcissism, the first part is much more
 telling. Not only is it accurate in regards to the true reason for
Gradus’ suicide, but it reveals Kinbote’s recognition of the
emptiness that comes with a loss of purpose. The belief that
182
there is no point in existing after one’s story is over is a strong
indication that Kinbote actually does end his life after completing
Pale Fire. Of course, Nabokov himself claims that “Kinbote
committed suicide (and he certainly did after putting the last
touches on his edition of the poem)” (Strong Opinions 74), and I
would think, given Nabokov’s relationship with Kinbote, that he
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knows best.
Thus far, the characters of Pale Fire have shown delusion
to be a double-edged sword. Despite its ability to sustain a person
through hard times, the dependency on these delusions can have
catastrophic and even fatal consequences, should the delusions
fail. Fortunately, this is not always the case. Hazel, Gradus, and
Kinbote all represent delusional extremes. Instead of using
delusions to only create a barrier between themselves and the
harsh truths that they could not face, these three characters
allowed their delusions to take over in an attempt to break with
reality entirely. Once the tremendous sensory evidence of the
outside world inevitably broke their delusions, they were
completely overwhelmed by the simultaneous assault of their
denied truths, like a village downstream from a failing dam.
The only character to handle his delusions effectively, and
thus avoid depression and suicide, was John Shade (though his
murder does mean that he was not given this option).John
embraced only moderate delusions and did not try to bend his
reality unnecessarily. Whereas Kinbote always tried to present
him as a famous poet, John said that his first collection of poetry

“was ‘universally acclaimed’ / (It sold three hundred copies in

one year)” (Pale Fire 58). He also refused to sugar-coat his

daughter’s imperfections and bluntly related the circumstances

regarding her suicide. Overall, he believed in only one obvious

delusion. Like Hazel, John held the narcissistic delusion that he

would not die. In his poem, he gives the aphorism, “other men

die; but I / Am not another; therefore I’ll not die” (40). This is,

generally, society’s most prevalent delusion.

As Dr. Shengold states, “We all retain differing degrees of

delusional claim to personal exemption from what we also know

as the universal fate” (Shengold 29). The delusion of immortality

allows a person to find a purpose or significance in life that might

otherwise be extinguished by the weight of knowing that his life

is fleeting, and therefore, that anything that he accomplishes will

have no lasting meaning. In this regard, John succeeded where

Hazel failed. Hazel’s mistake was that she built her delusion of
Pale Fire

immortality on something over which she had no control and

was transient by its very nature: her family. John, on the other

hand, put his faith in something that he could control that had

permanence: his poem.

This final, personal delusion leads into a much more

universal delusion that affects all of the characters. Friedrich 183

Nietzsche’s ideas about the necessity of illusions as a coping

mechanism for the cruel honesty of life are incredibly applicable

to the characters of Pale Fire. Nietzsche’s illusion, however, is

 not merely clinical, like those previously exhibited, but one that
is more inescapable, beneficial, and philosophical.
Nietzsche sees the way in which people understand the
184
world as illusory at its core. He explains that the way people
create a common language and name objects in order to
communicate is arbitrary and prevents a person from truly seeing
his own reality. Unlike Freud and his psychoanalysis, this
comparison would have also been much less offensive to Nabokov,
because this is a belief that both of them share. When asked how
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he viewed reality, Nabokov answered that, “You can get nearer

and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough
because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of
perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable”
(Strong Opinions 11). However, neither Nietzsche nor Nabokov
present these illusions as detrimental. On the contrary, Nietzsche
often refers to them as essential. He often exhibits a fear of honesty
or reality, claiming that the inability of a person to handle either
one would lead to “disgust and suicide” (Gay Science 90). This
holds true not only for Nabokov’s tragic creations, but for Nabokov
himself.
Nabokov admitted that he, like John Shade, had delusions
regarding his own death. In his autobiography, he “links his
capacity for personal love with his need for immortality”
(Shengold 33), stating: “I have to have all space and all time
participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of
my mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter
degradation, ridicule and horror of having developed an infinity
of sensation and thought within a finite existence” (Speak,
Memory). For Nabokov, love, such as his love of writing, is what
allows him to delude himself into avoiding an existential crisis.
Nabokov uses his delusions to expand his perception artificially
and force himself to believe that all of space and time are within
his control. He manages to establish and maintain this delusion
through his writing because his authorial power fulfills this desire
to be an omniscient and omnipotent controller.
This coping mechanism is transferred into his characters
as well. Kinbote’s love for Zembla, and by extension, himself,
and John’s love for poetry and his family are transcribed into
literature in an attempt to use each character’s respective
obsessions to immortalize themselves in print and fend off
thoughts of their own death. Kinbote’s struggle to adapt John’s
poem into his own demonstrates this narcissistic need to have
everything relate to himself in some way. This ability of literature
to aid in the creation and perpetuation of one’s delusions is the
reason that Nietzsche finds merit in aesthetic creations, especially
poetry.
Pale Fire

Nietzsche often refers to humanity, or more specifically

people who create art, as poets. He lauds their work and says,
“Our honesty has a counterpoise which helps us to escape [disgust
and suicide]; namely, Art, as the goodwill to illusion” (Gay Science
90). Thus, art is shown as an opposite and balancing force to
reality. Professor Lanier Anderson of Stanford explains that
Nietzsche understands that “art is valuable because it creates 185
illusions” (Anderson 194) and references Nietzsche’s belief in
The Gay Science that art can make “things beautiful, attractive,
and desirable, when they are not so” (146). However, this balance
 between “objective truth” and art, or lies, must be kept in
equilibrium.
Nietzsche does not advocate a complete rejection of the
186
truth but he realizes that one cannot comprehend the entire truth
of existence. A person would be crushed under the knowledge
of his own insignificance long before he reached this goal.
Therefore, illusions must be maintained in order to shield oneself
from the general truths while at the same time providing the
strength required to reach a specific truth. As Nietzsche tells the
nomad

reader in his book, The Will to Power, “It is necessary that you
should know that without this form of ignorance life itself would
be impossible, that it is merely a vital condition under which,
alone, a living organism can preserve itself and prosper: a great
solid belt of ignorance must stand about you” (235).
Professor Alexander Nehamas of Princeton expands on
this idea by saying, “[The will to ignorance] must also turn upon
itself and become the will not to know that one is failing to know
many things in the process of coming to know one.” (Nehamas
69). Though awkwardly worded, this quote does reveal the
sustaining quality of delusions. By hiding in one’s delusions and
ignoring certain truths, one can take shelter from the immensity
of one’s ignorance. Thus delusion becomes a kind of curtain that
one can draw in order to make oneself believe that one knows
the whole truth, thus allowing one to take comfort in one’s limited
knowledge and understanding.
However, if a person’s delusions are too strong, as they
were for the characters in Pale Fire, it can be just as harmful as
having delusions that are too weak. When a person stops searching
for the truth and withdraws further into the comfort of his
delusions, he ends up alienating himself from society. Although
a person can sustain himself in a completely delusional world,
the allowance of any truth through that barrier of illusion is
catastrophic. The solution to this problem lies in moderation.
Nietzsche “suggests a way to do justice to both sides—
balancing the demand for truth against the need for illusions, as
‘counterforces’” (Anderson 205). With the right balance of
delusions, one can gain enough strength and confidence to search
for a specific truth without being cowed by the crushing weight
of one’s ignorance. Kinbote, when discussing suicide, asks, “What
can prevent us from yielding to the burning desire for merging in
God? We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps
the one sin that ends all sins” (Pale Fire 222). The answer is
found in delusions.
While the positive and negative affects delusions can have
on one’s sense of self-preservation has been shown in a variety of
cases, it must be admitted that the people that have been studied,
Pale Fire

with the exception of Nabokov himself, are all fictional. But one
should consider Nietzsche’s question: “Of what account is a book
that never carries us away beyond all books?” (Gay Science 129).
Though the characters’ ties to the real world are nonexistent or
tenuous at best, that does not mean that their actions and reactions
are inapplicable to a person of flesh and blood. These characters
exist in fiction, a type of literature that is, in turn, a form of art. 187
To Nietzsche, Nabokov, Shade, and Kinbote, the written
word (particularly one produced by a poet) is the strongest
facilitator of delusion. Nietzsche uses poets to describe his ideal
 artists because the layers of meaning in poetry allow for readers
to consciously extract their own meaning. As Anderson says,
“Nietzsche is attracted to art partly because it is especially honest
188
in recognizing its illusions as such” (Anderson 208). In Pale Fire,
Kinbote represents an absurd combination of this idea with
Nabokov’s delusion of immortality. Kinbote’s obsession with
twisting John’s poem into his own embodies Nabokov’s need to
include “all of space and time” in his love, but at a certain point,
even Kinbote realizes that his interpretation is a mere delusion.
nomad

However, while Nabokov, Shade, and Nietzsche are writing to

preserve themselves, Kinbote is using the words of another to
protect himself.
After Shade’s murder, Kinbote actually wears the cards
on which Shade had written his poem, both symbolically and
literally taking shelter in the delusion created by the literature.
Kinbote describes himself as being “plated with poetry, armored
with rhymes, stout with another man’s song, stiff with card-board,
bullet-proof at long last” (Pale Fire 300). In this situation, it is
not the poet who is drawn into the delusion of his art, but his
reader. This ability to create delusions from literature is fortuitous.
A reader can draw on work that has been written by another and
receive the same benefits as the author. It becomes possible to
forget one’s troubles by immersing oneself in the lives of others
or incorporate literary interpretations into one’s own illusory
perception, thereby strengthening it. Another important aspect
in this relationship between the reader and literature is the
irrelevance of both the writing’s type (fiction, non-fiction, poetry
or prose) and source (from the current bestseller to the first man
to put ink to paper). Nietzsche’s view of words as metaphors for
reality means that reading is a personal, interpretive act, because
although the words may originate from someone else, the reader
understands and relates to the words based on his own
experiences. However, one last word of caution. A person must
be careful if he is to use literature to enhance his delusional self-
sustainment. If he loses control of his delusions and engages in
flights of fancy in the vein of Icarus, then he risks becoming a
Kinbote.

Works Cited

Anderson, R. Lanier. “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and

Redemption.”European Journal of Philosophy, 13.2 (2005): 185-
225. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Great Britain: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1999. Print.
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. United States of
America: Harvard University Press, 1985. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. New York: Barnes and Noble,
2008. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power (Volumes I and II).
Pale Fire

Digireads.com Publishing, 2010. eBook.

Vladimir, Nabokov. Pale Fire. New York: Random House, Inc., 1962.
Print.
Vladimir, Nabokov. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.
New York: Random House, Inc., 1967. Print.
Vladimir, Nabokov. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill
International, 1973. Print.
Shengold, Leonard. Delusions of Everyday Life. Yale University,
1995. Print.
189
 VANIA LOREDO
Vania Loredo is a junior triple major-
ing in political science, history, and
Latin American studies. She believes
that educating about human rights
violations is important in order to cre-
ate a more conscious society. After
graduation, Vania plans to continue
her studies in Latin American studies
primarily focusing on human rights is-
sues in the region.

Mentor: Antonio Couso-Lianez

WITHOUT A HAND TO HOLD:

THE EXPLORATION OF BRAZILIAN CHILDREN’S FAMILY
REALITY IN CHILD OF THE DARK AND CIDADE DE DEUS

D esperation, hunger, violence, murder and prostitution are some of

the everyday occurrences that children experience in the favelas,
shantytowns created outside the city of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
These favelas initiate the children into violence since they see and
experience the manner in which the struggle for survival takes a toll on
people due to the change of behavior they experienced as they enter it.
As outcasts of society, favela children become alienated from the
city and as a result they have limited resources such as access to
education and employment. In the autobiographical diary Child
of the Dark, and in the film Cidade de Deus (City of God), children
become central in the examination of the favela since they are
the ones most involved in its everyday chaos. The development
of the characters as gang leaders through violence is sustained by
Cidade de Deus. Child of the Dark reflects the cruel reality of
poverty through the eyes of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a single
mother, who struggles with her children to survive the favelas in
Sao Paulo. In both, the deconstruction of traditional family models
and the formation of new family structures are shown through
the evolution of favelas. In particular, the evolution of the
characters’ personalities as they take leadership roles in the gangs
and spend more time in the streets separates them from their
families since they do not have a connection with their parents
and rather prefer the streets as their source of shelter.
The evolution of the favela can be found within the
Brazilian Favelas

descriptions in the first scenes of Cidade de Deus and Child of

the Dark and thus provide a historical context within their
narrative. In both novel and film, their characters are the effect,
according to their narratives, of the development of the favelas
since as the favela increases its population, the violence becomes
greater. In the 1960s, “Rio [had] 200 favelas with a population of
333,500 souls, a 99 per cent increase over the 1950 census. In 191
Sao Paulo, there [were] only seven favelas, with 50,000 living
there” (Maria de Jesus 8). The increase of population in these two
cities was the impact of the population boom that occurred in
 Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s and the increase in employment
opportunities that these cities offered.
For Carolina Maria de Jesus, who migrated at an early age
192
from “Sacramento, Minas Gerais in the interior of Brazil” (Maria
de Jesus 9) to Sao Paulo, the favela represented salvation from
the economic chaos that she faced. However, as she arrived to
the city searching for better opportunities, her dreams were
crushed as she saw the reality of the city. There were limited
employment opportunities and thus immigrants found themselves
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alienated from the city culture. Their only alternative was to create
for themselves a place where they could be accepted and that is
how the favelas began. As Carolina Maria de Jesus describes in
Child of the Dark, “The work wasn’t there. Not for all anyway,
and those who couldn’t find work settled on low unwanted
swamplands in Sao Paulo or on high hills in Rio [de Janeiro] and
built their shacks. Thus the favelas, the slums, began” (Maria de
Jesus 8). The favela was and still is the physical symbol of poverty
in Brazil. This symbol is powerfully illustrated in Cidade de Deus,
which depicts children playing soccer in a desolated area in the
beginning scenes of the film. Around them, there are shacks that
served as houses for families. The precarious conditions of the
favelas do not permit families to establish themselves in such a
way that they might thrive.
The juxtaposition of tone and image within both works
brings to light the manner in which the favelas and its children
learn to cope with their reality. Their reality is full of poverty and
abandonment; and though they have adapted to it, it does not
mean that it is invisible or non-existent. The opening of Cidade
de Deus is full of vibrant samba, a popular Brazilian form of music
and dance, which sets the tone for the first images of the film, the
chasing of a rooster. However, the music is juxtaposed to the reality
of the favela: It is a place where a child needs to always guard
him or herself from the violence that exists. The chasing of the
rooster is a symbol that represents the constant chase that gang
members must give, running after each other and innocent people
who stand in their way. Just as the rooster needs to avoid capture,
the characters of the film have to be always in motion since they
want to escape their reality and create their own, and thus must
constantly fight the odds of getting caught and being brought back
to a reality that they want to reconstruct and avoid.
Carolina Maria de Jesus, the autobiographical subject of
the memoir, Child of the Dark, lives in the expanded modern city
of Sao Paulo, whose its luxurious buildings and prestigious
citizens are out of reach for people like her. She comments in her
diary, “It was Sunday and people were shocked to see beggars
crowding on the Bom Retiro bus” (65). Carolina mentions the fact
Brazilian Favelas

that people from the city do not really believe in the existence of
people like her, who are the outcasts of society.
At the same time, children like Jose Carlos and Joao,
Carolina’s sons, are the most affected under the reality of favela
conditions. In her story, her children become very vulnerable to
the surrounding environment. They understand that in order to
survive they need to do whatever is in their power to obtain money 193
to pay for food. As Carolina describes: “[Vera] said that she and
Jose Carlos had gone out begging. He had one of the [begging]
sacks on his back” (Maria de Jesus 77). In this sense, Carolina’s
 children have the same experiences that other children have in
the favelas; although their mother tries to protect them, they are
not immune to the influence of the streets.
194
The anthropologist Tobias Hecht, in his book At Home in
the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil, analyzes the
attitudes of favela street children and hence realizes that the streets
provide them with experience. One of his interviewees, Edivaldo,
a street favela child, states the following: “I think I have way too
nomad

much experience now. The street doesn’t have anything to offer

you except experience. In the street we learn how to live because
at home we get spoon-fed everything. It’s not like that in the
streets” (Hecht 28). Applying Hecht’s testimonies to my
exploration of both works, the fictional characters of Cidade de
Deus have this similar behavior since their lives are in the streets.
Their jobs, which for the majority are robbery and drug trafficking,
transform the characters into a product of the streets rather than
a product of their home environment. The home environment
becomes absolute since each of its members leaves either
temporarily or permanently to seek better opportunities. Also,
this type of behavior is expressed within Carolina’s narrative, since
children experience these reactions since they spend most of their
time in the streets, and thus find themselves learning more from
them than at home. The contradiction between the desire of
mothers like Carolina to create a safe environment for her children
and the attraction children have for the streets creates a tension
that is exacerbated by the re-structuring of family systems in the
favelas.
 Carolina’s family challenges the manner in which
traditional families are viewed since she parents three children
by herself and thus challenges social norms. Traditional families
in Brazil tend to have either one parent working or two parents
working while children go to school. In both Cidade de Deus and
Child of the Dark, the child characters also contribute to the
family’s income since they go into the streets to work.
In this way, these creative works mirror the actuality of
life in Brazilian favelas. As described in Child of the Dark, families
undergo a transformation within their environment in order to
survive. According to the narrator, “Sometimes families move
into the favelas with children. In the beginning they are educated,
friendly. Days later they use foul language, are mean and
quarrelsome. […] They are transformed from objects that were in
the living room to objects banished to the garbage dump” (Maria
de Jesus 39). The family structure breaks down within the chaos
of the favela society, which means that there are no rules or a set
behavior for the children to follow. Rather, they are immersed in
Brazilian Favelas

an ambitious reality. Economic stability becomes children’s and

parents’ number one concern, leaving the family as the last
priority. Children are required to go in the streets and support
their families since all incomes are necessary in order to survive.
In Cidade de Deus and Child of the Dark, all of the young
characters go to the streets in order to find some type of income
and thus reflect the reality of the working class favela members 195
in both cities.
Because they are also breadwinners for their families, Vera,
Joao, Jose Carlos, from Child of the Dark , and Lil Ze, from Cidade
 de Deus, are able to create their own world. In Carolina’s diary,
her children have an independent life separate from their mother.
As she goes into the streets, her children Vera, Jose Carlos, and
196
Joao have a completely different conception of the world around
them. They see violence in every instance of their lives and this
violence becomes part of who they are. Joao, for instance, has
been accused of sexually abusing his two-year old neighbor. As
she narrates, “She told me that Joao had hurt her daughter. She
said that my son had tried to rape her two-year-old daughter and
nomad

that she was going to tell everything to the Judge” (Maria de Jesus
79). Throughout the narrative there is no clarification about this
statement. Rather, Carolina accepts that in fact he has attempted
rape. The matter is handled as part of normal daily life occurrences
as if were almost natural that this type of event were to unfold.
This specific moment in the story can also be translated
into research done about the type of character that favelas create
in the children. As explained by Hecht, children who grow up in
the streets do not distinguish between the levels of violence that
exist; rather, they follow their instincts because they see
themselves as adults (Hecht 12). There is no distinction for them
between childhood and adulthood since the first has not really
existed for them. In the same manner, in Cidade de Deus, the
children involved with gangs seem to see gangs as part of a natural
progress due to the lack of connection to their families. These
children do not have a stable family system; and thus, find refuge
in the streets. In both works, the reflection of the struggle of
families to preserve their connection in the favelas becomes
tainted due to the lack of economic stability. Through the literary
lenses of these two works, children become disconnected and
thus find a connection in the streets since the favela streets gives
a place to develop and grow. They receive instruction in order to
how to perform in the real world; something that their parents
have not been able to provide them.
A “favela personality” as explored in detail in Cidade de
Deus, consists of a rebellious attitude and desire to obtain power
within the favela. This applies especially to the people living in
Cidade de Deus, who are surrounded by an environment that
prohibits them from accessing resources necessary for their
development as members of Brazilian society. As explained by
Janice Pearlman in her book Favela: Four Decades of Living on
the Edge of Rio de Janeiro: “For the children, born in the city, the
quest was for higher education, for getting out of the favelas, and
for a sense of recognition and respect…Their particular challenges
are finding work, avoided being killed, and finding respect”
(Pearlman 339). Yet these children are forced to create their own
environment with the lack of means that society has granted them.
Brazilian Favelas

This problem is reflected clearly in Rio de Janeiro, where the

hidden reality of the favelas (Muir, Studying City of God) is not
commented on in mainstream society. The film Cidade de Deus
thus becomes a window through which the narrative of favela
children comes alive. Though fictional, the film accurately
documents their loss of innocence at the hands of violence as
well as reshapes the manner in which the family is portrayed. 197
The traditional family model becomes fragmented and
reconstructed and leaves space for children to seek another refuge
to call home.
 In both works, the constant theme of alienation does not
only explain the favela as being a world of its own but also explains
the alienation of the family concept in the minds of children.
198
This alienation becomes complex as children explore the
possibilities of “making” it in the streets. There is a powerful
dichotomy that exists within favela children: family vs. street. In
Cidade de Deus, the character of Shaggy struggles to find his place
at home since he feels that the streets provide him with more
nomad

opportunities to become economically stable. However, when the

streets become rough, he believes that home is his place to go.
As such, it is very difficult to differentiate these two themes since
children spend their lives going back and forth between the two.
As described by Hecht, favela children stay in the streets because
they feel that they have more possibilities there. As one of his
interviewees responded: “On the one hand it’s better because I
eat. I fill my belly, and there’s still more left over, but not at home.
At home I even gobble up the plate” (Hecht 55). In that sense,
being in the streets provides children a better home where they
can have a better opportunity to fulfill their necessities.
On the surface, the disappearance of the paternal figure
within the favela children’s daily lives does not affect them since
their parents do not provide them with any of the resources for
their survival. In Cidade de Deus, there is a similar situation with
two of the main characters, Bene and Little Zé, who belong to the
most powerful gang of the Cidade de Deus favela. These two do
not have a sense of family unity, except for each other, since they
have worked in the streets together from an early age. They do
not have a connection with their families, and there are rarely
scenes with their families in the film; rather, their sense of family
unity stems from each other.
In contrast to the narrative of Carolina Maria de Jesus, the
narrative of Rocket in Cidade de Deus offers an inside view of the
cycle of violence and its impact on children who belong to the
gangs. Rocket is the eyes of the story since he reports the events
that have unfolded in the Cidade de Deus favela. The younger
brother of Shaggy sees the destructive path that children go
through due to the violence that exists in the favelas since his
brother fell into the hands of the favela gangs and died trying to
leave it. Children in this film learn how to survive the favela, yet
once outside, they are not considered to be gente, people. In a
society that is supposed to provide shelter, its most fragile and
defenseless members are not protected; rather, they are
transformed into the enemy. As Pearlman discusses, favelas and
its inhabitants are not in themselves “problematic”; what becomes
problematic is the lack of intervention of the government and its
Brazilian Favelas

laws that prevent the favelas from being part of society. In this
way, Cidade de Deus becomes a pathway for understanding the
problems that exist in Brazil, in the inequality that prevents people
from integrating into the larger society, especially children. The
rupture of traditional family structures is a consequence of the
dehumanizing conditions of the favelas, in which people are not
‘suficiente gente’. The fact that parents and children are both 199

described as parasites of society creates a separation between these

two, since their parents are also trying to figure out their place in
society.
 Unconsciously, in Child of the Dark, Carolina describes
the way her children become attracted to the dangers of the street
as she observes that they spend the vast majority of their time
200
there. The children of Carolina Maria de Jesus go to the streets
out of necessity, but once there, they find themselves attracted to
what they find there, despite dangers. She describes a moment
where her son, Jose Carlos, breaks the window from a factory. “I
went to see the window. It was broken […] I asked Jose Carlos
what he was doing there, walking around like a tramp looking
nomad

for trouble” (Maria de Jesus 150). Carolina fails to realize the

exposure that her children experience in the streets while they
collect paper. In her mind, she believes that her children ought to
behave with dignity; they ought to be respectable “poors.”
However this is not the case, since she also remarks: “favela
children of fifteen stay out as late as they want. They mess around
with prostitutes and listen to their adventures” (Maria de Jesus
24). Carolina is critical of the way favela children grow up without
realizing that her children also run the risk of becoming like them.
There is an attraction towards the freedom that exists within the
streets, that children find alluring.
Cidade de Deus shows a different side of favela children
that involves self-corruption in order to survive the violence and
stay alive. A confrontation between the characters of Blacky, one
of the most prominent gang members in the Cidade de Deus favela,
and Lil Zé, unravels as part of Lil Ze’s plan to take over Blacky’s
drug business. Lil Zé, who “always wanted to be the boss of Cidade
de Deus,”(Muir 67) decides to confront him by ambushing him
in his apartment, shooting him in the leg and letting Blacky live
with the condition that he will work for Lil Zé. In this moment,
the character’s personality transforms. He becomes tainted through
the power that he obtains within the streets. As Rocket describes,
“He was prepared for anything” (Cidade de Deus). His self-dignity
is overshadowed by his thirst for more power and money. Lil Zé
constructs a drug empire and begins to kill everyone who stands
in his way. The streets have taught him that in order to “get what
he wants” the ends justify the means. He recruits children in order
to serve him as messengers, and trains them to commit murder
and perform robberies; in that way he preserves the essence of
the favela, a place where children do not have an established
home or family, but they have the streets to serve them as parents.
The fact that, in the streets, children can control their lives
empowers them to continue living there. Favela children are aware
of their position within society through the marginalization that
they experience. In a society that is supposed to provide shelter
for its children, we see that the favelas reflect the opposite, and
so the children create a separate world: a favela society. As
Brazilian Favelas

described by Janice E. Perlman’s The Myth of Marginality:

“Paradoxically, the characteristic way to handle the dread of these
masses is to profess a desire to integrate them into the very system
which is producing the social and economic situation called
‘marginalized’” (Perlman 92). Children seek the freedom that
society does not give them. The story of Little Zé, who is barely
eighteen, is a story of power and control. As mentioned earlier, 201
Little Zé has committed many murders and robberies, and passes
down these crimes to other children. His thirst for violence comes
from the fact that he sees it as the only path for people to realize
 who he is. For instance, he kills in front of the public “for people
to respect him.” (Muir 66). Yet this respect is only gained through
fear. As a consequence, Little Zé believes that he can control his
202
life and the people around him because his status as a favela gang
member provides him precisely that. His thirst for violence is the
result of marginalization and he sees it as the only way that he
can be the king of the favela and continue to manipulate people.
Child of the Dark can be understood as providing
background for narratives and films like Cidade de Deus because
nomad

it creates a platform for understanding why there is a permanent

stage of violence in Brazil in the 1970s. Child of the Dark unfolds
during the 1950s through the 1970s in Sao Paulo when the city
was experiencing a population growth in the favelas, which
continued to increase throughout the next decades. From below
a 1% percent increase from 1950-1960 to a 5.24% increase from
1964-1971, the favela became the most prominent place where
immigrants would come to start a new life in the city (Lloyd-
Sherlock 291). Because of this, Child of the Dark illustrates not
only the stage of poverty in Sao Paulo, but also the problems
poverty will create in the future, such as the increase of street
children, child gangs, and the increase of drug trafficking, which
spreads to other parts of Brazil, such as Rio de Janeiro. All these
future occurrences will happen in Cidade de Deus, in which all
its characters are involved directly and indirectly with the
violence that exists in their favela. The characters of Lil Zé, Bene,
and Rocket have either committed crimes or have been exposed
to violence; violence that has gradually developed as a
consequence of population growth. This has affected the manner
in which favela families survived since their children must leave
their homes in order to become emancipated from the burden of
being poor.
The children in the favelas endure the hardships that their
lower class status has given them. During this time period, second,
third and fourth generations of favela children found themselves
challenging this pre-determined life of economic misfortune. They
do not accept their destiny to become paper collectors, as
previously seen in Child of the Dark, and they want to have access
to more than their parents can provide. Though they are
marginalized in society and are described as a “public scandal
and public nuisance” (Scheper-Hughes 240), these children
become the face of the favelas. In Child of the Dark, Carolina’s
children live in the midst of the violence and crimes that happen
right in front of them, and even though they are young, their lives
are often tied with these types of occurrences. Their attraction to
the streets, due to the freedom that it provides, leads them to
become involved in gangs and slowly earn the respect of other
Brazilian Favelas

favelas, as in the case of Cidade de Deus, through the crimes they

have committed and the fear that they impose on others. Their
families are in the streets, where they find the economic security
and can obtain the goods that their other family cannot offer them.
In that sense, both Cidade de Deus and Child of the Dark are
narratives that tell the stories of children who are prevented from
being children since the care and shelter that families ought to 203
provide for them are sacrificed by the struggle for survival. These
children are abandoned because their families cannot compensate
for a society that has failed to help the favelas and its children.
 Works Cited

Cidade De Deus: City of God. Dir. Walter Selles. 2003. 02 Films. DVD.
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nomad

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Brazilian Favelas